TY - JOUR AU - Currie,Janet AU - Walker,Reed TI - Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15413 PY - 2009 Y2 - October 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15413 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15413.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Janet Currie Princeton University 316 Wallace Hall Princeton, NJ 08544 Tel: 609-258-7393 Fax: 609-258-5974 E-Mail: jcurrie@princeton.edu Reed Walker Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Economics Columbia University 1022 International Affairs Building New York, NY 10027 Tel: 315-382-4986 E-Mail: rw2157@columbia.edu AB - This paper provides evidence of the significant negative health externalities of traffic congestion. We exploit the introduction of electronic toll collection, or E-ZPass, which greatly reduced traffic congestion and emissions from motor vehicles in the vicinity of highway toll plazas. Specifically, we compare infants born to mothers living near toll plazas to infants born to mothers living near busy roadways but away from toll plazas with the idea that mothers living away from toll plazas did not experience significant reductions in local traffic congestion. We also examine differences in the health of infants born to the same mother, but who differ in terms of whether or not they were “exposed” to E-ZPass. We find that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8% respectively. Estimates from mother fixed effects models are very similar. There were no immediate changes in the characteristics of mothers or in housing prices in the vicinity of toll plazas that could explain these changes, and the results are robust to many changes in specification. The results suggest that traffic congestion is a significant contributor to poor health in affected infants. Estimates of the costs of traffic congestion should account for these important health externalities. ER -