Conference Agenda
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Thematic Session: Sensing air quality: information, experience, and implications for workplace productivity
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| Session Abstract | ||
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Poor air quality, both ambient and indoor, is a pressing concern worldwide, leading to millions of lives lost as well as significant losses in productivity, among other effects. This session brings together evidence on causes and consequences of air pollution exposure in settings characterized by different levels of air pollution and income. The first two papers show how information about indoor air quality at home drives behavior change and reduction in exposure both in a sample of UK households who were randomly assigned a sensor and in a sample of US households who purchased an air quality sensor, although the defensive behaviors adopted appear different. The third paper, however, provides a cautionary tale where information alone does not appear to increase adoption of air purifiers in Bangladesh, and findings suggest household do not value air purifiers. Given that indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure exceeds WHO guidelines in most of the world, the last two papers in the session set out to estimate the consequences in terms of workplace behavior and productivity. The fourth paper examines air pollution exposure effects for delivery workers in Italy and finds that air pollution increases the risk of accidents and decreases productivity, which workers try to make up by working longer hours, thus putting themselves at higher risk. The fifth paper examines the effects of air purification on high-skill workers, namely attendees to academic conferences in Colombia and India. It finds that despite improved air quality, air purifiers do not affect conference engagement and participants’ behavior, thus suggesting these might not be the main drivers of productivity effects. | ||
| Presentations | ||
Making the Invisible Visible: The Impact of Revealing Indoor Air Pollution on Behavior and Welfare 1LSE, United Kingdom; 2Columbia University, US Exposure to ambient air pollution harms health and productivity and has motivated many mitigation policies. However, as people spend 90% of their time indoors, it is essential to understand exposure to Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) and, if high, ways to reduce it. We design and implement a field experiment in London that monitors households’ IAP and randomly reveals their IAP in real time. At baseline, IAP exceeds ambient pollution when residents are home and is above WHO standards 38% of the time. We also find a steep household income-IAP gradient—larger than the income- ambient pollution gradient. During the experiment, real-time feedback reduces IAP by 17% (1.9 μg/m3) overall and 34% (5 μg/m3) during occupancy. The mechanism is behavioral: households increase natural ventilation (e.g., opening windows and doors) in response to feedback. In terms of welfare, we find: (i) a willingness to pay of £4.8 ($6) per 1 μg/m3 reduction in indoor PM2.5; (ii) higher willingness to pay for mitigation than for full information; (iii) a price elasticity of demand for IAP monitors around -0.75; and (iv) that a subsidy for an IAP monitor or air purifier yields an infinite marginal value of public funds - a Pareto improvement Private Risk Information and Household Mitigation Behavior 1University of Basel, Switzerland; 2Columbia University, New York We examine how private information about indoor air quality affects household mitigation behavior using data from residential pollution monitors. Exploiting the timing of monitor installation and high-frequency fine particulate matter (PM2.5) measurements, we find that indoor PM2.5 concentrations decrease by 2.5 µg/m3 over the twelve weeks following monitor installation, controlling for outdoor pollution levels. The improvements are concentrated among households with high initial indoor pollution, and the extent and speed of reductions depend on the initial levels of indoor relative to outdoor pollution. Using machine learning techniques to identify cooking episodes and air purifier adoption, we attribute the majority of observed improvements to air purifiers, with the largest effects occurring during periods of high outdoor pollution. Ventilation appears to serve as an immediate but temporary mitigation measure, and we find no changes in cooking behavior. Our results suggest that private risk information induces net-beneficial defensive investments, particularly when baseline risk is high. Residential Air Purifiers and the Valuation of Cleaner Air 1IGC; 2UC San Diego; 3Tufts; 4NUS Despite some of the world's worst air quality, fewer than 1\% of middle-class households in Dhaka, Bangladesh own air purifiers. We investigate this puzzle through two field experiments. First, we document that households significantly underestimate indoor pollution levels and purifier effectiveness. Although households that receive monitors or demonstrations update their beliefs, neither information provision nor interest-free loans increase willingness to pay. Second, we remove adoption barriers entirely by providing purifiers for free and compensating households for the electricity cost, yet households use them for only 30 minutes a day, resulting in no measurable health benefits. We show that accounting for this low usage substantially changes the results of standard methods for measuring the value of clean air from purchase decisions or WTP elicitation of defensive technologies, which typically assume full utilization. Instead we estimate the Marginal Willingness to Pay (MWTP) directly from objective, high-frequency usage choices and randomized variation in operating costs and find that MWTP for cleaner air is far smaller than previous estimates and tightly bound around zero. These findings suggest that low adoption of defensive technologies in highly polluted environments reflects low private valuation of the environmental amenity itself. Riders in the Smog: How Air Pollution Affects Workers in Urban Environments 1Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy; 2Centro Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC); 3Joint Research Centre, European Commission; 4Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona Using large-scale high-granularity data from a food delivery platform and granular pollution and weather information, we study how PM2.5 fluctuations affect riders' absenteeism, productivity, and accidents. Exploiting exogenous pollution variation from inverse boundary layer height, we find that higher pollution increases absenteeism for all workers and raises delivery times and accident rates only among (e-)bike riders, who must exert physical effort while working. Affected workers compensate productivity losses by working longer hours. Monetary incentives mitigate the effects on absenteeism but do not offset the decline in productivity and appear to exacerbate accident risk. Air Quality and Conferences' Engagement 1University of Warwick, United Kingdom; 2University of Southampton Delhi; 3University of Oxford; 4Universidad del Rosario; 5Warwick Business School We examine the effect of air pollution on participation, collaboration, and feedback provision in a workplace setting. We randomly assigns air purifiers to rooms at three academic conferences to investigate the impact of air pollution on participants’ engagement behavior. We construct a participant engagement index based on behavioral outcomes measured by conference observers, using weights elicited from an expert survey. Rooms treated with air purifiers exhibit 48% less PM2.5 concentration. However, we do not find a statistically significant change in engagement. Communication in the workplace might not be a large driver of the empirical relationship between air quality and productivity. | ||