TY  - JOUR
AU  - Zivin,Joshua S. Graff
AU  - Neidell,Matthew J.
TI  - The Impact of Pollution on Worker Productivity
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17004
PY  - 2011
Y2  - April 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17004
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17004.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Joshua S. Graff Zivin
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0519
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519
Tel: 858/822-6438
E-Mail: jgraffzivin@ucsd.edu

Matthew J. Neidell
Department of Health Policy and Management
Columbia University
722 W 168th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10032
Tel: 212/342-4522
Fax: 212/305-3405
E-Mail: mn2191@columbia.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2011-09-01
AB  - 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.
ER  -