Although a large share of the world’s population is employed in manual labor, our understanding of the productivity costs of air pollution for physically intensive work remains limited. This paper estimates the effect of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) on purely physical tasks by analyzing half a million amateur track and field competition results, a setting where cognition plays a minor role. Exploiting the panel nature of the data and high dimensional fixed effects, I find that a 10 µg/m3 increase in PM 2.5 reduces performance by 1% of a standard deviation. The effect grows with the duration of effort, indicating that productivity losses may be larger for occupations requiring low-intensity and sustained effort, such as construction workers.
Presentations: IAERE 2021, EAERE 2021, AERE@SEA 2021