Air Pollution, Wildfire Smoke, and Worker Health

Little is known about how pollution impacts worker health and safety. This paper leverages high-frequency, plausibly exogenous variation in wildfire smoke exposure to estimate the impact of pollution on workplace injuries. Our analysis draws on unique data we construct through linking information on smoke plumes and pollution to comprehensive administrative data on workers’ compensation injury claims from Texas. We first document that wildfire smoke increases ambient air pollution—with our estimates indicating that a day of smoke coverage is associated with an average increase in PM2.5 of 18.6%. We find that an additional day of smoke coverage leads to a 2.8% increase in workplace injury claims. The incidence of these pollution-induced injuries is unevenly distributed across workers, and supplemental analysis reveals potential opportunities for targeting costly mitigation. Our estimates suggest that pollution—and wildfire smoke in particular—substantially harms worker health, even at pollution levels well below current and proposed regulatory standards. Further, the magnitude of our estimated impacts is sizable relative to prior estimates of other impacts of pollution. Overall, our findings suggest workers face unique risks from pollution and provide insights for policy aiming to address these risks.