【AEW Webinar】Air Pollution, Wildfire Smoke, and Worker Health

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• 研討會日期 : 2025-03-06
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor Marika Ilona Cabral
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Marika Ilona Cabral received her Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in 2011. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are Health Economics, Public Finance, and Industrial Organization.
• 演講摘要 : Despite growing concerns about the impact of pollution on workers, little is known about how pollution impacts worker health and workplace safety. This paper leverages high-frequency, plausibly exogenous variation in wildfire smoke to estimate the impact of pollution on workplace injuries. Our analysis draws on unique data we construct through linking information on smoke plumes and pollution to comprehensive administrative data on workers’ compensation injury claims from Texas. We first document that wildfire smoke increases ambient air pollution—with our estimates indicating that a day of smoke coverage is associated with an average increase in PM2.5 of 18.6%. We find that an additional day of smoke coverage leads to a 2.8% increase in workplace injury claims. Similar percent increases in workplace injuries are found across different types of injuries and workers. However, because of large variation in baseline injury risk, the incidence of these pollution-induced injuries is concentrated among workers in high-risk occupations, and supplemental analysis illustrates potential opportunities for improving the targeting of costly mitigation. Our estimates indicate that pollution—and wildfire smoke in particular—substantially harms worker health, even at pollution levels well below current and proposed regulatory standards, and the costs associated with increased workplace injuries are in the same range as the costs of many previously documented important adverse impacts of pollution. Overall, our findings suggest workers face unique risks from pollution and provide insights for policy aiming to address these risks.
• Working Paper Title : Marine Microplastics and Infant Health
• Working Paper Speaker : Professor Xinming Du
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Xinming Du received her Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from Columbia University in 2023. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests are Environmental Economics, Applied Microeconomics, and Digital Economy.
• Working Paper Abstract : A century of plastic usage has led to an accumulation of plastic waste in waterways and oceans. Over time, these wastes break down into particles smaller than 5 microns – or “microplastics” – which can infiltrate human biological systems. Despite decades of research into this emerging source of environmental pollution, there is a paucity of direct evidence on the health impacts of microplastics exposure at a population scale. This paper reports the first empirical link between in-utero microplastic exposure and adverse birth outcomes. Our analysis is based on a compiled dataset of 3 million births that occurred in coastal areas of 15 countries spanning four continents, which we merge with a novel remote-sensing measurement of marine microplastic concentrations. We show that in-utero exposure to microplastics, particularly during the third trimester of pregnancy, leads to a significant increase in the likelihood of low birth weight. A doubling of exposure increases low birth weight hazard by 0.37 per 1,000 births, which implies over 205,000 cases per year globally can be attributed to microplastic exposure. We further show that aerosolization – whereby microplastic particles become airborne and inhalable due to seawater evaporation – is an important pathway for health impact, a challenge that is likely to escalate as ocean temperatures continue to rise.