Current work

Air pollution in low- and middle-income cities imposes enormous health costs, yet private investment in protection remains low. In a series of randomized field experiments - in Mexico City, Tbilisi, Ulaanbaatar, Kampala, and Pakistan - my co-authors and I study how households perceive air quality and what drives demand for clean air: information, prices, or the constraints households face.

Working papers:

Know Thy Foe: Information Provision and Air Pollution in Tbilisi

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10852. A randomized evaluation of air quality information provision in Tbilisi, Georgia. 

On-going projects:

Recovering Private Valuations for a Public Good (with Teevrat Garg, Raymond Guiteras, and Arman Rezaee)

We develop methods to elicit households' willingness to pay for public goods and apply them to air purifiers in classrooms in Pakistan. Field work is in progress.

The Adoption and Impact of Air Purifiers: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Mexico City (with Ludovica Gazze and Bridget Hoffmann)

A randomized evaluation in Mexico City studying barriers to household adoption of air purifiers and the effects of cleaner indoor air on health and well-being.

Air quality information in African cities (with Ruozi Song, Nancy Lozano-Gracia, and collaborators at EPIC/University of Chicago and NASA)

Design work for a multi-country randomized evaluation of air quality information provision.

The effects of air quality information in Ulaanbaatar (with Lydia Kim and Megan Lang)

Heating transitions and indoor air quality in Ulaanbaatar (with Lydia Kim and Megan Lang)

South Asian cities are among the most polluted in the world. This work examines the drivers of that pollution - agricultural burning, firm behavior, and the institutions that regulate both - and its economic consequences.

Working papers:

Man or Machine ? Environmental Consequences of Wage Driven Mechanization in Indian Agriculture

This paper uses an exogenous shock to wages from the world’s largest anti-poverty program to show that higher wages can lead to increased air pollution, likely by inducing farmers to shift into a labor-saving and mechanized production process. Using a difference-in-differences approach on the staggered roll-out of India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), combined with data on nearly 1 million fires, the paper shows that the frequency of agricultural fires increases by 21 percent after the shock. The increase in fires is concentrated in districts that appear more likely to mechanize the harvest. MNREGA did not lead to changes in area planted or tonnage produced in fire intensive crops. The estimates show that nationally, the shock increased the rate of particulate emissions from biomass burning by 30 to 50 percent. The results suggest that absent policies to correct for environmental externalities of mechanization at all stages of development, labor market shocks may lead to inefficient levels of mechanization.

Summary on Development Impact

Air pollution reduces economic activity: Evidence from India (with Rishabh Choudhary and Dhruv Sharma)

Exposure to fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) increases mortality and morbidity and reduces human capital formation and worker productivity. As a consequence, high levels of particulate pollution may adversely affect economic activity. Using a novel dataset of annual GDP changes in Indian districts, we investigate the impact of changes in the level of ambient PM2.5 on district-level GDP. Using daily temperature inversions as an instrument for pollution exposure we find that higher levels of particulate pollution reduce GDP. The effect is non-trivial - the median annual increase in PM2.5 levels reduces year to year changes in GDP by 0.56 percentage points. 

Decoding Green Justice: An AI-Assisted Exploration of Indian Environmental Court Rulings over Five Decades (with Shareen Joshi, Olexiy Kyrychenko, Viknesh Nagarathinam, Peter Neis, and Shashank Singh)

Using the full corpus of Indian environmental court rulings and modern language models, we examine how the judiciary has shaped environmental regulation - and observed air pollution - in India. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper forthcoming.

Delhi courts and air pollution (with Shareen Joshi and Olexiy Kyrychenko) - R&R at Environment and Development Economics

On-going projects:

Access to Credit and Industrial Emissions (with Piyush Gandhi and Teevrat Garg)

How does access to formal credit change firms' emissions? Draft in progress.

Working papers:

Air Pollution and Learning (with Joshua Goodman, J. Parker Goyer, and R. Jisung Park) - NBER Working Paper forthcoming.

Air Pollution and Student Learning in Pakistan (with Saher Asad and Martin Heger) -  World Bank Policy Research Working Paper forthcoming.

Heat reduces human performance across a wide range of tasks and settings. With Jisung Park and other co-authors I examine the consequences of heat for workers - productivity, safety, and earnings - and what determines whether firms, workers, and institutions adapt.

Working papers:

Temperature, Workplace Safety, and Labor Market Inequality (with Jisung Park and Nora Pankratz)

Using data covering the universe of injury claims from the nation’s largest worker’s compensation system (2001-2018), we explore the relationship between temperature and workplace safety and its implications for labor market inequality. Hotter temperature increases workplace injuries significantly, causing approximately 20,000 injuries per year. The effects persist in both outdoor and indoor settings (e.g. manufacturing, warehousing), and for injury types ostensibly unrelated to temperature (e.g. falling from heights), consistent with cognitive or cost-related channels. The risks are substantially larger for men versus women; for younger versus older workers; and for workers at the lower end of the income distribution, suggesting that accounting for workplace heat exposure may exacerbate total compensation inequality. We document a decline in the heat-sensitivity of injuries over the study period, suggesting significant scope for adaptation using existing technologies.

Will we adapt? Temperature, Labor, and Adaptation to Climate Change  (with Jisung Park)

We explore the labor-related production impacts of temperature stress both for its own interest and to understand the role of adaptation in responding to climate change. Focusing on non-agricultural sectors in the United States, we find that hot temperatures exert a causal, negative impact on county-level payroll  -- reducing payroll by several percentage points in a 2C hotter year  -- with larger impacts in highly exposed industries such as construction and manufacturing. We assess differences in implied adaptation investments across regions with varying incentives for long-run adaptation, and find evidence consistent with hotter climates being better adapted to hot weather.

Press coverage:

New York Times (part 2); LA Times; Washington Post; The Guardian; Vox; Economic Times; Science News; NPR; Seattle Times; Scientific American; US Council on Economic Advisors; Voice of America; Marketplace

On-going projects:

Labor Market Frictions and Adaptation to Climate Change (with R. Jisung Park, Nora Pankratz, and Paul Stainier) - under review

Workplace heat burdens are unequal: Quantifying individual climate risk in the US labor market (with R. Jisung Park and Paul Stainier)