Working is worse in the midst of pollution – 7/4/2023 – Bernardo Guimarães

With winter, the air in the city of São Paulo becomes more polluted. The ugly smoke stains the horizon and blots out the stars.

We know that pollution affects the incidence of respiratory diseases and people’s health in general. Is the work productivity of healthy people also affected?

Of course, sick people produce less, and disease is costly in many ways. But does pollution have noticeable direct effects on how hard we work and how much we produce?

In economics, it is typically difficult to identify what causes what. Pollution can affect productivity, but changes in the economy clearly affect air quality—for example, by affecting pollutant emissions from factories and automobiles.

In principle, it would be possible to verify how changes in pollution in short periods of time caused by meteorological factors —and therefore not caused by changes in the economy— affect productivity. One problem is that, in general, we don’t have measures or estimates of work productivity for each day.

Researchers Haoming Liu and Alberto Salvo of the National University of Singapore have found ways to bypass these obstacles and answer these questions.

In one of their works, co-authored with Jingfeng Lu, they use data from WTA Beijing Open tennis matches. Each game is worth a lot—the median prize pool for a win is $15,000, not counting effects on prestige and sponsorship.

Beijing is a very polluted city, but with a lot of variation in pollution levels. Thus, we can compare matches that occur, luckily or unluckily, on more or less polluted days. Also, data frequency in this case is not an issue —we know what happens in games every day.

The problem is that pollution affects tennis players on both sides of the court. How to measure the effect of pollution?

In a tennis match at this tournament, there are two possible outcomes: a 2 sets to 0 win and a 2 sets to 1 win. Each set takes a little less than an hour.

The authors argue, using a mathematical model, that if pollution affects the willingness to exert effort to seek victory, we should look at more 2-0 games.

The idea is this: if I lost the first set, winning the game would require winning the other two. That would take a lot of effort for a long time. Either because that effort would leave me finished for the next day’s match, or because it’s too unpleasant to push myself so hard in adverse conditions, I would choose to push myself less.

On the other hand, if I won the first set, the effort to win the second is particularly valuable in adverse conditions, as it saves me from an especially draining third set.

The researchers show that, in fact, on more polluted days, there are fewer games with 3 sets. Whoever wins the first has a higher than normal chance of winning the second.

In another work, Haoming Liu, Alberto Salvo and Jiaxiu He study the productivity of workers in the textile industry in China. In these cases, there is daily performance data because workers are paid for how much they produce each day.

They show that weeks of more intense pollution have a significant, if small, effect on the productivity of healthy people. A day or a week of increased pollution does not seem to have an effect.

The conclusion is that pollution has direct effects on the productivity of healthy people even in the short term. The effects found are not very large, but they are one more factor in the account of costs and benefits of controlling air pollution.

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