Jump to Navigation

Josh Graff Zivin's Research Featured in The Energy Collective

NBER: Air Pollution Lowers Labor Productivity

05/03/2011
Joseph Romm, The Energy Collective

    … 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….

    Importantly, this environmental productivity effect suggests that common characterizations of environmental protection as purely a tax on producers and consumers to be weighed against the consumption benefits associated with improved environmental quality may be misguided. Environmental protection can also be viewed as an investment in human capital, and its contribution to firm productivity and economic growth should be incorporated in the calculus of policy makers.

That’s from an important new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study by Zivin and Neidell, “The Impact of Pollution on Worker Productivity.”

We’ve known for a long time that clean-air regulations are a boon to public health, with benefits far outweighing costs (see “Clean Air Act delivered $1.3 trillion in health and other benefits in 2010 alone at $53 billion cost“).

And there is a large literature on the boost in human performance and productivity from improving indoor environments on  — as documented at this Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory website.  But the NBER paper is, surprisingly, “the first to rigorously assess the less visible but likely more pervasive impacts on worker productivity.”

Click here to read the full article.

Related Links

Josh Graff Zivin is Associate Professor of International Relations and Pacific Studies and Affiliated Faculty of Economics. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Research Director for International Environmental and Health Studies at the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).

Similar Stories In:

Back to Top