The Impact of Temperature on Productivity and Labor Supply: Evidence from Indian Manufacturing
By Anant Sudarshan, E. Somanathan, R. Somanathan, M. Tewari. Journal of Political Economy, 2015
540 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Hotter years are associated with lower economic output in developing countries. We show that the effect of temperature on labor is an important part of the explanation. Using microdata from selected firms in India, we estimate reduced worker productivity and increased absenteeism on hot days. Climate control significantly mitigates productivity losses. In a national panel of Indian factories, annual plant output falls by about 2% per degree Celsius. This response appears to be driven by a reduction in the output elasticity of labor. Our estimates are large enough to explain previously observed output losses in cross-country panels.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f492d6249636ce5bb0aa3ec8452d4507b2cf6ec
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Temperature and Human Capital in India (2020, unknown): “3A rich literature considers the impacts of higher temperatures on a variety of economic outcomes including output (Burke and Emerick, 2016; Burke, Hsiang and Miguel, 2015a; Somanathan et al., 2015), mortality (Barreca et al.”
- The GDP-Temperature relationship: Implications for climate change damages (2021, unknown): “There is disagreement in the recent empirical literature as to whether temperature affects the level of economic output or its growth 7See Schlenker and Roberts (2009); Ortiz-Bobea et al. (2018); Graff Zivin and Neidell (2014), and Sudarshan et al. (2015).”
- Temperature effects on mortality and household adaptation: Evidence from China (2019, background): “…2016; Zhang et al., 2017a, b) and manufacturing output (Zhang et al., 2018; Chen and 2010; Graff Zivin and Neidell, 2014), increased absenteeism (Somanathan et al., 2015), and reduced 2). nd Greenstone (2011), Barreca (2012), and Barreca et al. (2016), for example. developing countries compared…”
- Climate Change, Firm Performance, and Investor Surprises (2019, unknown): “In contrast to Somanathan et al. [2015] and Zhang et al. [2018], we focus on financial measures of performance instead of economic concepts that measure productivity.”