Brown Bag Seminar: A Toast to Health? Cognitive Returns for Children Conceived Under Local Pesticide Regulations

The expansion of Prosecco vineyards in Italy's Veneto region has led to increased pesticide use, raising concerns about maternal health and child neurodevelopment. We study the medium-term cognitive effects of prenatal pesticide exposure, exploiting the staggered rollout of municipal regulations following the 2012 Regional Pesticide Guideline, which introduced buffer zones, anti-drift standards, and pesticide bans. By linking local adoption dates to population-wide second-grade test scores, we find that treated children in early-adopting municipalities, defined as those that introduce a restrictive ordinance within roughly two years of the 2012 Regional Pesticide Guideline, score 0.200 standard deviations higher in mathematics. We do not detect any effect on Italian language scores, nor do we find comparable gains in mathematics for treated children in later-adopting municipalities, indicating that improvements are concentrated in quantitative reasoning and among early adopters. We show that the results are robust to several potential threats. Estimates are larger when we use second-order neighbouring municipalities as controls, consistent with downward bias from spillovers onto adjacent controls. Student transfer data indicate modest sorting into treated municipalities, a pattern that biases our estimates downward. Municipal fine revenues remain stable after adoption, pointing to high compliance driven by deterrence. These results demonstrate that local command-and-control policies can successfully reduce environmental externalities and improve long-term child health and human capital formation. This is a joint work with Alessandro Palma (GSSI) and Daniela Vuri (Tor Vergata University).