Effect Of Long-term Exposure To Air Pollution On Subjective Well Being

Previous studies have mostly concentrated on the effect of short term exposure to air pollution on Subjective Wellbeing(SWB)while using aggregate(country/province level)pollution and weather data.We make use of individual data from the China Household Income Project(CHIP)2002 and 2007 waves combined with county-level pollution data from the Ministry of Environmental Protection(MEP)and meteorological data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA)weather stations to investigate the effects of long term air pollution exposure on self-reported Subjective Wellbeing in China.We find that there is a significant negative association between air pollution and Subjective Wellbeing and that this association is stronger for air pollution measured through the Air Pollution Index(API)than through the Percentage of Heavily Polluted days.For the former we found that the effect persists for lagged pollution values of up to six months and only one month for the later.