Noise Pollution and Academic Performance in India

Abstract Many cities across the developing world are witnessing high noise pollution due to infrastructure development and construction works. Despite rising noise pollution, large-scale empirical research on the impact of noise on learning has been sparse. We fill this research gap by investigating whether noise pollution can influence student performance. Leveraging spatial-and-temporal variation in the noise pollution recorded by the monitoring stations within major cities in India and the academic performance in Class 12 examinations across schools located within these cities, we find that a ten percentage-point increase in noisy days in the January-March quarter increases the failure percentage of Class 12 boys by 6.1 percent. This pattern is not gender-neutral, as no association is observed between noise pollution and the academic performance of Class 12 girls. Furthermore, we find no effect of noise pollution recorded in the months away from examination days. Leveraging the variation in schools’ proximity to the nearest noise monitoring station, we find that the association between noise pollution and academic performance is strongest when the schools are located within close proximity of the nearest noise monitoring station. For schools located within 1 km of the nearest noise monitoring station, we find that a ten percentage-point increase in noisy days in the January-March quarter increases the failure percentage of Class 12 boys by 11.3 percent. We explore and discuss three potential mechanisms that can drive the noise-learning relationship. Our findings are consistent with one of them: noise pollution hurts attention when the cognitive burden of students to perform well in examinations is high. Evidence from the data rules out the possibility of poorer quality schools selecting into locations with higher noise as the mechanism driving the observed effect of noise pollution on academic performance. Our findings also rule out the possibility that economic growth by itself can trigger attention depletion that can explain the negative effect of noise pollution on academic performance. Overall, we show that noise pollution has an adverse impact on student performance, and this relationship is driven by the cognitive burden mechanism rather than selection or economic growth mechanisms.