Indoor Air Quality and Cognitive Performance

Steffen Künn (), Juan Palacios () and Nico Pestel
Additional contact information
Juan Palacios: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

No 12632, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper studies the causal impact of indoor air quality on the cognitive performance of individuals using data from official chess tournaments. We use a chess engine to evaluate the quality of moves made by individual players and merge this information with measures of air quality inside the tournament venue. The results show that poor indoor air quality hampers cognitive performance significantly. We find that an increase in the indoor concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by 10 μg/m3 increases a player's probability of making an erroneous move by 26.3%. The impact increases in both magnitude and statistical significance with rising time pressure. The effect of the indoor concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is smaller and only matters during phases of the game when decisions are taken under high time stress. Exploiting temporal as well as spatial variation in outdoor pollution, we provide evidence suggesting a short-term and transitory effect of fine particulate matter on cognition.

Keywords: cognition; indoor air quality; worker productivity; chess (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I1 J24 Q50 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published - revised version published as 'Indoor Air Quality and Strategic Decision Making' in: Management Science, 2023, 69 (9), 5354-5377

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12632.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12632

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().