Happiness in the Air: How Does a Dirty Sky Affect Mental Health and Subjective Well-being?

By Xin Zhang, Xiaobo Zhang, Xi Chen. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2017

595 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous studies evaluating the welfare cost of air pollution have not paid much attention to its potential effect on mental health and subjective well-being (SWB). This paper attempts to fill the gap by investigating the impact of air pollution on several key dimensions, including mental health status, depressive symptoms, moment-to-moment happiness, and evaluative happiness. We match a nationwide longitudinal survey in China with local air quality and rich weather conditions according to the exact time and place of survey. By making use of variations in exposure to air pollution for the same individuals over time, we show that air pollution reduces hedonic happiness and increases the rate of depressive symptoms, while life satisfaction has little to do with the immediate air quality. Our results shed light on air pollution as an important contributor to the Easterlin paradox that economic growth may not bring more happiness.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d53c1b8a7d13ee942f7154120028547b66d5b9cd

Citations in the corpus

• A review of air pollution impact on subjective well-being: Survey versus visual psychophysics (2018, unknown): “…study by Zhang et al. they successfully valued air quality using moment-to-moment happiness data in a daily and local level and found bad daily air quality affect overall life satisfaction not much but it reduces hedonic happiness and increases the rate of depressive symptoms (Zhang et al., 2017).”