Environment, Health, and Human Capital

By Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Neidell. 2013

584 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to nonrandom assignment of pollution, economists have employed a wide range of quasi-experimental techniques to develop causal estimates of the effect of pollution. Second, economic research has placed a considerable focus on the role of avoidance behavior, which is an important component for understanding the difference between biological and behavioral effects of pollution and for proper welfare calculations. Lastly, economic research has expanded the focus of analysis beyond traditional health outcomes to include measures of human capital, including labor supply, productivity, and cognition. Our review of the quasi-experimental evidence on this topic suggests that pollution does indeed have a wide range of effects on individual well-being, even at levels well below current regulatory standards. Given the importance of health and human capital as an engine for economic growth, these findings underscore the role of environmental conditions as an important factor of production. (JEL I12, I31, J24, Q51, Q53)

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c19b7a7fb73aeb9e3fa71427144e09573561568

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Citations in the corpus

How harmful is air pollution to economic development? New evidence from PM2.5 concentrations of Chinese cities (2018, background): “…leave the serious polluted cities in China, which may cause the capital outflow and brain drain and eventually damage local economic growth (Graff Zivin and Neidell, 2013).3 In summary, haze pollution not only does harm to human beings but also has serious negative impacts on the sustainable…”
Performance Management, High-Powered Incentives, and Environmental Policies in China (2015, background): “Recent evidence suggests there is no long-run tradeoff between environmental protection and economic growth, because pollution reduces human capital and the productivity of labor (Zavin and Neidell 2013).”
Every Breath You Take—Every Dollar You’ll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970 (2017, unknown): “Thus, earlylife exposure to air pollution may affect long-run human capital formation and adult earnings through both neurological channels and direct health impairments (Graff Zivin and Neidell 2013).”
Productivity Effects of Air Pollution: Evidence from Professional Soccer (2017, background): “Our findings hence complement previous empirical evidence on air pollution’s negative effects on the productivity of low-skilled agricultural and factory workers in countries with higher levels of pollution (Graff Zivin and Neidell, 2012; Chang et al., 2014; Li et al., 2015).”