The Impact of Indoor Air Pollution on the Incidence of Life Threatening Respiratory Illnesses: Evidence from Young Children in Peru

This article analyses the impact of indoor air pollution on boys' and girls' health, and the validity of various mitigation strategies using a panel of Peruvian children younger than six years old. It controls for unobserved child heterogeneity and important confounding variables established in the literature, but seldom available in surveys. The analysis finds a negative, statistically significant and considerable impact of indoor air pollution on child respiratory health. This impact is stronger and only significant for boys. To discard a spurious correlation the article shows diarrhoea, a priori not related to pollution, is not affected by cooking fuel choice.