Dr. Sanjukta Mitra is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Southampton, Delhi. She is currently completing her PhD in Economics at Iowa State University, with an expected completion in July 2026. As an applied microeconomist, she studies the intersections of environmental, health, and labor economics using causal inference methods. Her research focuses on understanding the social costs and distributional effects of air pollution, behavioral adaptations to environmental harm, and policies that could mitigate them, examining individual and firms' compliance behaviors.
Toxic Tradeoffs: Impact of Environmental Regulations on Workplace Safety in Mining (JMP) Environmental regulations reduce ambient pollution exposure, which may benefit workers at regulated firms; on the other hand, new compliance costs may crowd out safety investments at firms, increasing the risk of worker injuries. This paper estimates the short-run net effects of the 1990s Clean Air Act (CAA) PM10 standards on workplace injuries in the mining sector by employing Difference-in-Differences, using a panel linking Mine Safety and Health Administration mine-year injury records to novel sub-county PM10 nonattainment boundaries for 1983–1997. Serious nonattainment designation increased workplace injuries by 3.7 per 100 full time workers, and severe injuries by 0.972 per 100 full-time workers, imposing an economic cost on workers of roughly $0.20 billion (1990 dollars) per year. These effects persist across specifications and are driven by reduced safety compliance, increased work hours and overexertion among retained staff. The findings reveal thorny distributional tradeoffs: relative to the large but diffuse health benefits of the 1990 CAA Amendments, the safety costs are small and concentrated among less experienced, vulnerable workers.
Does Toxic Industrial Pollution Moderate the Effect of Early Childhood Interventions on Test Scores? (Co-Authored with Dr. Irene Jacqz)
Early childhood environment is critical in shaping future outcomes. Despite this, the interplay of early-life environmental exposures and early childhood interventions in shaping human capital remains highly under studied. We explore this question by linking fourth-grade standardized test scores in New York to plausibly exogenous variation in pollution from entry-exit of Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) firms and exposure to early childhood interventions from the Head Start funding expansion in the 1990s. We find that exposure to an additional TRI facility reduces the marginal effect of Head Start investments on grade four test scores by 0.06 SD. This finding underscores the social cost of air toxins in diminishing the marginal benefits of preschool intervention programs.
Does Access to Subsidized Public Health Insurance Impact Pollution Defensive Investments?
This paper investigates the impact of access to low-cost health care on investments in pollution defensive goods like air purifiers and air filters. The pollution-health relationship is influenced by both pollution avoidance actions and access to medical care after exposure. While low-cost health care improves access to post-exposure medical care, its impact on pollution avoidance actions remains unclear. To explore this relationship, I exploit the ZIP code-month variations in wildfire smoke pollution and access to free health insurance through the 1 Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion of 2014. Using a triple Differences-in-Differences approach, this paper finds that the ACA Medicaid expansion marginally reduced investments in pollution defensive goods among low-income households in response to wildfire smoke events. However, this effect was observed only in the first year of the ACA expansion.
Prices vs. Taxes: Evidence from Household Fuel Consumption in India (Co-Authored with Dr. Sandip Agarwal)
While fuel taxes have traditionally been an important tool for addressing environmental externalities, in recent years, it has also emerged as a significant revenue stream for the Government of India. In light of this, we attempt to answer two research questions: First, do households’ petroleum consumption in India respond differentially to a change in fuel state-tax and central-tax compared to an equivalent change in the fuel price? Second, how does the transition of the fuel pricing mechanism in India from a partially deregulated system to a complete deregulation impact households’ responsiveness to fuel taxes and prices in India? Using household month panel data on petroleum consumption, we find three main results: (1) Household petroleum consumption in India is four times more responsive to a change in the state tax compared to an equivalent change in the tax-exclusive price of petroleum (2) The short-run price elasticity of petroleum demand in India is -0.21 which is nearly half the responsiveness to petroleum state-tax and almost ten times the price elasticity of gasoline demand in the US (3) Following the transition to a Dynamic Pricing Mechanism, households’ responsiveness to fuel price, central tax, and state tax increased by 35%, 87%, and 38%, respectively.
Works-in-Progress
Social Networks and Household Protective Investments: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke Pollution (Co-Authored with Xinhui Sun).
