Replication Files: Impact of An Infrastructure Failure on Cognitive Performance

Description

Natural and human-made disasters can affect health and human capital in affected communities. This paper studies the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which caused fatalities, injuries, major traffic disruption, and involved a school bus carrying 63 students. Using Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment data, I compare schools near the collapsed bridge to a statewide comparison group constructed using coarsened exact matching. The preferred coarsened-exact-matching-weighted stacked difference-in-differences estimates show that schools within 2.5 miles of the bridge experienced declines of 0.49 standard deviations in reading and 0.52 standard deviations in mathematics. Schools in the broader traffic-disruption area experienced smaller declines of 0.15 standard deviations in reading and 0.20 standard deviations in mathematics. Synthetic difference-in-differences estimates are similar. Air quality improved modestly near the bridge, suggesting that achievement declines are more consistent with disruption than with pollution exposure.

Steps to reproduce

This replication folder contains all the codes and cleaned data used to generate all figures and tables using Stata. The data cleaning process and construction of the final dataset are described in the data construction file. Most of the raw and semi-processed data, along with the corresponding build codes needed to generate the main analysis datasets, are also provided. This replication folder has the following four subfolders: I. Code: All the Stata codes in .do file format II. Data: All the cleaned data in .dta file format III. Outcome: Graphs and tables IV. Raw Data and Codes: Raw input data and the corresponding code/scripts Instructions to Replicators I. Open Stata/MP 19.5 or a compatible earlier/later release. II. Open Code/master_file.do. III. Edit the global ROOT definition at the top of master_file.do so that it points to the Replication Folder on the local computer. Use forward slashes in the path; for example: global ROOT "C:/Users/yourname / Replication Files Infrastructure Failure Cognitive Performance". IV. Run master_file.do. It defines the Code, Data, and Outcome paths, checks user-written commands, and executes the analysis programs in the intended order. V. Generated tables and figures will be written to Outcome/Tables and Outcome/Figures. The final section maps each paper item to its generating program and output filename. VI. To rebuild the analysis-ready files from the supplied raw and intermediate data, run the programs in Raw Data and Codes/Code in this order: append_merge_final.do, gis_minnesota.do, merge_gis_new.do, and building_final_data.do. ArcGIS Pro or QGIS is required for spatial steps represented by the supplied project packages rather than Stata code.

Institutions

• University of California, Irvine

  California, Irvine

Categories

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