The Impact of Pollution on Worker Productivity

By Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Neidell. The American Economic Review, 2012

1,128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Environmental protection is typically cast as a tax on the labor market and the economy in general. Since a large body of evidence links pollution with poor health, and health is an important part of human capital, efforts to reduce pollution could plausibly be viewed as an investment in human capital and thus a tool for promoting economic growth. While a handful of studies have documented the impacts of pollution on labor supply, this paper is the first to rigorously assess the less visible but likely more pervasive impacts on worker productivity. In particular, we exploit a novel panel dataset of daily farm worker output as recorded under piece rate contracts merged with data on environmental conditions to relate the plausibly exogenous daily variations in ozone with worker productivity. We find robust evidence that ozone levels well below federal air quality standards have a significant impact on productivity: a 10 ppb decrease in ozone concentrations increases worker productivity by 4.2 percent.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44b1ada3a0a21b94e24da65b5469eadfcd486f85

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Citations in the corpus

Environmental policies and productivity growth: a critical review of empirical findings (2015, background): “Gray and Shadbegian (2003) show that integrated mills, subject to stricter environmental regulation due to the integrated pulping process, show a significant reduction of productivity due to increases in abatement costs, whereas productivity of non-integrated mills does not show any substantial redu”
From Fog to Smog: the Value of Pollution Information (2019, background): “As a point of reference, Cutter and Neidell (2009) find that when a “Spare the Air” alert is issued in the San Francisco Bay Area, daily traffic falls by 2.5-3.5 percent with the largest effect during and just after the morning commuting period.33 Graff Zivin and Neidell (2009) estimate that a one-d”
The Light and the Heat: Productivity Co-Benefits of Energy-Saving Technology (2019, neutral): “…exposed to very high or 4Several recent studies document this relationship in more developed settings (Chang et al., 2014; Costinot, Donaldson, & Smith, 2016; Graff Zivin & Neidell, 2012; Hanna & Oliva, 2015). low temperatures for extended periods of time (Vanhoorne, Vanachter, & De Ridder, 2006).”