The Effect of Pollution on Worker Productivity: Evidence from Call-Center Workers in China

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. ABSTRACT The Effect of Pollution on Worker Productivity: Evidence from Call-Center Workers in ChinaWe investigate the effect of pollution on worker productivity in the service sector by focusing on two call centers in China. Using precise measures of each worker's daily output linked to daily measures of pollution and meteorology, we find that higher levels of air pollution decrease worker productivity by reducing the number of calls that workers complete each day. These results manifest themselves at commonly found levels of pollution in major cities throughout the developing and developed world, suggesting that these types of effects are likely to apply broadly. When decomposing these effects, we find that the decreases in productivity are explained by increases in time spent on breaks rather than the duration of phone calls. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that the negative impacts of pollution on productivity extend beyond physically demanding tasks to indoor, white-collar work.JEL Classification: J22, J24, Q51, Q53

Air Quality and Manufacturing Firm Productivity: Comprehensive Evidence from China

“…These papers significantly advance our understanding of how pollution affects productivity and convincingly demonstrate that air pollution causes labor productivity to decrease. However, because these studies rely on the exogeneity of air pollution as an identification strategy, they focus on narrow groups of workers in particular occupations such as fruit picking (Graff Zivin and Neidell, 2012), pear packing (Chang et al, 2016a), call center services (Chang et al, 2016b), garment assembly (Adhvaryu et al, 2014a) or a few firms in textile assembly (He, Liu et al, 2016). Air pollution has also been found to negatively impact short-run productivity of outdoor sports personnel including soccer players (Lichter et al, 2015), marathon runners (Fu and Guo, 2016), and baseball umpires (Archsmith et al, 2016).…”

Air pollution and worker productivity

“…As with the previous study, the authors also found that PM 2.5 does not affect labor supply. PM 2.5 also had effects on productivity at levels below air quality standards, with effects arising at 20-25 μg/m 3 . In terms of the magnitude of the effect, based on approximate calculations, the authors estimate that the worker productivity effects represent roughly 25% of the total benefits (as measured by changes in housing values) from improvements in air quality.…”

“…In recent work, researchers explore the effect of PM 2.5 on the output of call center workers, which represents an important part of the service sector, in two cities in China [3]. In this setting, worker output is routinely monitored, as the workers receive partly performance-based pay depending on the number of phone calls completed, thus providing precise measures of each worker's daily output.…”

“…Previous work of the author contains a larger number of background references for the material presented here and has been used intensively in all major parts of this article [1], [2], [3].…”

Severe Air Pollution and School Absences: Longitudinal Data on Expatriates in North China

“…We observe students' nationalities, both foreign and Chinese, and the time since first enrolling at the school which, for children of expatriate families, may be a reasonable proxy for their time of residence in China. We are thus able to look for heterogeneous responses of absences to short-run variation in PM2.5 across nationality, 1 Exceptions are studies examining worker or household-level panels in China and Peru (Chang et al, 2016a;He et al, 2017;Aragon et al, 2016). Given their developing country setting, these three studies focus on particulate matter.…”