Air Pollution and the Labor Market: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke

Mark Borgschulte, David Molitor and Eric Zou

No 29952, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study how air pollution impacts the U.S. labor market by analyzing effects of drifting wildfire smoke that can affect populations far from the fires themselves. We link satellite smoke plumes with labor market outcomes to estimate that an additional day of smoke exposure reduces quarterly earnings by about 0.1 percent. Extensive margin responses, including employment reductions and labor force exits, can explain 13 percent of the overall earnings losses. The implied welfare cost of lost earnings due to air pollution exposure is on par with standard valuations of the mortality burden. The findings suggest that labor market channels warrant greater consideration in policy responses to air pollution.

JEL-codes: J21 Q51 Q52 Q53 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-hea, nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: EEE LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29952.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Air Pollution and the Labor Market: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke (2022)
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:nbr:nberwo:29952

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29952

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().