Abstract
This paper examines the effect of biomass burning on adolescent health in India. The biomass burning problem is quite acute especially in North India, with some states experiencing forest fires and few states actively engaging in crop burning practice. We combine remote sensing data on biomass burning events with a pan-India survey on teenage girls (TAG survey). We exploit regional and temporal variation in our data to establish the link between occurrence of extremely high levels of biomass burning during early life and adolescent height for girls in India. Our results indicate that exposure to extremely high level of biomass burning during prenatal and postnatal period is associated with lower height (by 0.7 percent or 1.07 cm) later in life. Girls from North India are found to be especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of exposure to biomass burning.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 101244 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Resource and Energy Economics |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue number | 101244 |
| Early online date | 5 Jun 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Aug 2021 |
Bibliographical note
We extend our sincere thanks to Naandi Foundation for sharing the Teenage Girls Dataset (TAG) with us. We would also like to thank the editor and our two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. SETI-2019 Workshop participants and Dr. Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay provided generous support and helpful suggestions. Prachi Singh acknowledges the support she received from Environment for Development (EfD) and Sagnik Dey acknowledges the support from the Centre of Excellence for Research on Clean Air (CERCA) and from IIT, Delhi for the Institute Chair position.Keywords
- Human capital
- India
- Crop burning
- Forest fires
- Remote sensing
