Air pollution and defensive expenditures: Evidence from particulate-filtering facemasks

By Junjie Zhang, Quan Mu. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2017

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rational individuals take preventive measures to avoid costly air pollution exposure. This paper provides new empirical evidence of pollution avoidance that Chinese urban residents purchase particulate-filtering facemasks against ambient air pollution. The analysis is conducted with detailed and comprehensive data available on daily facemask purchases and air quality that became available only very recently. We find that this transitory air pollution avoidance behavior exhibits dynamics and nonlinearities, with significant increases of facemask purchases during extreme pollution episodes. The daily model shows that a 100-point increase in Air Quality Index (AQI) increases the consumption of all masks by 54.5 percent and anti-PM2.5 masks by 70.6 percent. The estimates from the aggregated model with flexible pollution levels are used to simulate the benefit of air quality improvement. If 10 percent of heavy pollution days were eliminated, the total savings on facemasks alone would be approximately 187 million USD in China. This result suggests that reducing the occurrence of "airpocalypse" events represents a significant opportunity to improve social welfare. Nevertheless, our estimates are likely only the lower bound of the benefit of clean air because facemasks can only partially reduce the negative health effects of air pollution and the costs of other avoidance behaviors are not included.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c712369f3e4d342f1d1f443fa45f83f86120b42

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Liguo Lin
2. P. Barwick
3. Yu Qin
4. Shanjun Li
5. E. Zou
6. Hongjia Zhu

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. Yu Qin
2. Shanjun Li
3. Hongjia Zhu

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. Yu Qin
2. Shanjun Li
3. Hongjia Zhu
4. Mark Jacobsen

Citations in the corpus

• The Effect of Air Pollution on Migration: Evidence from China (2017, unknown): “Several studies have demonstrated that people engage in short-run avoidance behaviors such as staying indoors (Neidell, 2009) or purchasing particulate-filtering facemasks (Zhang and Mu, 2018) in a highly polluted day.”
• From Fog to Smog: the Value of Pollution Information (2019, background): “…Neidell, 2009; Saberian, Heyes and Rivers, 2017), engaging in defensive spending (e.g., buying face masks and air purifiers) (Ito and Zhang, 2018; Zhang and Mu, 2018), and making choices to change residential locations or migrate (Chay and Greenstone, 14 Under imperfect information on pollution,…”
• Run away? Air pollution and emigration interests in China (2017, methodology): “Instead, the Poisson regression model is an appropriate alternative estimation method in this context, which is also applied in Mu and Zhang (2014) where the online sales index of mask is used as the outcome variable.11 The interpretation of βn in the Poisson model is analogous to the log-linear…”