Replication Files: Impact of An Infrastructure Failure on Cognitive Performance
Description
Natural and human-made disasters can have far-reaching impacts on health and human capital for affected individuals. The 2007 collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, led to a substantial disruption of the learning environment for students in affected communities. The collapse resulted in numerous fatalities and injuries; notably, a school bus carrying 63 students was on the bridge during the collapse, and traffic patterns were disrupted for a year. Using a two-way fixed effects and synthetic difference-in-differences approach, I find that the bridge collapse leads to lower standardized test scores for affected schools relative to similar unaffected schools. Furthermore, I provide evidence that improvements in air quality due to reduced traffic do not outweigh the trauma-induced psychological stress impacts of the disaster.
Files
Steps to reproduce
This replication folder contains all the codes and cleaned data used to generate all figures and tables using Stata. Data cleaning process and construction of the final dataset are described in the data construction file. The raw data would be available upon request. This folder has the following three subfolders: I. Code: All the Stata codes in .do file format II. Data: All the cleaned data in .dta file format III. Outcome: Graphs, tables and latex files The following Stata scripts are included in Code subfolder: • air_pollution.do: This Stata script produces the tables for the pollution analysis in the paper. • main_analysis.do: This Stata script produces the tables for the main results in the paper. • synthetic did.do: This Stata script produces the tables for the synthetic difference-in-differences analysis in the paper. • robustness checks.do: This Stata script produces the tables for the robustness analysis in the paper. • weather.do: This Stata script produces the tables for the weather analysis in the paper. • summary.do: This Stata script produces all the summary statistics tables in the paper. • graphical analysis.do: This Stata script produces all other figures in the paper. The following data are included in Data subfolder: • 2006_2009_metro_pollution.dta: Pollution data from 2006 to 2009 including relevant GIS information about the bridge and highways. • global_pollution.dta: Surface level monthly PM2.5 data extracted from raster files (see data construction file for more details). • pollution_weather.dta: Pollution and weather data merged together from 2006 to 2009. • school_outcome_final_gis.dta: Final dataset of school outcome • analysis.dta: A subset of final dataset of school outcome used for flexibility. • 94_analysis.dta: School outcome data including location of I-94 Bridge • robustness.dta: A subset of final dataset of school outcome used for flexibility in the robustness checks analysis. All tables, figures, and LaTeX files needed to reproduce the paper are provided in the 'outcome' subfolder. Software: The code was last executed using Stata 4-core MP version 17.