Abstract

“A lab in the (track and) field? The effect of air pollution on physical performance: Evidence from sports competitions”A large share of the world’s population is employed in manual labor. This paper estimates the effect of air pollution on purely physical tasks analyzing half a million amateur track and field competition results. In contrast to previous studies, the setting allows excluding productivity effects through the cognitive channel. Exploiting the panel nature of the data and high dimensional fixed effects, I find that a 10 µg/m3 increase in PM 2.5 reduces performance by 1.1% of a standard deviation. The effect grows with the duration of effort, indicating that occupations requiring low-intensity and sustained effort may be more affected by air pollution than occupations requiring occasional short but intense bursts of energy.

Francesco Granella