Temperature and Human Capital in the Short- and Long-Run

Graff Zivin, J, S Hsiang, and M Neidell, “Temperature and Human Capital in the Short- and Long-Run,” Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 5(2018): 77–105.

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We provide the first estimates of the potential impact of climate change on cognitive performance and attainment, focusing on the impacts from both short-run weather and long-run climate. Exploiting the longitudinal structure of the NLSY79and random fluctuations in weather across interviews, we identify the effect of temperature in models with child-specific fixed effects. We find that short-run changes in temperature lead to statistically significant decreases in cognitive performance on math (but not reading) beyond 26°C (78.8°F). In contrast, our long-run analysis, which relies upon long-difference and rich cross-sectional models, reveals an imprecisely estimated effect that is significantly smaller than the short-run relationship be-tween climate and human capital.