Matt presented his paper, "The Pollution–Productivity Curve: Non-Linear Effects and Adaptation in High-Pollution Environments." Air pollution harms labor productivity, yet little is known about whether workers adapt to chronic exposure. Matt addresses this question using performance data from India's premier cricket league, which provides exogenous variation in both acute pollution exposure and long-term exposure histories. He finds that a 10 microgram per cubic meter increase in PM2.5 reduces productivity by about 1 percent, with effects concentrated at extreme pollution levels that far exceed WHO guidelines. However, workers appear to adapt: those with the highest levels of chronic exposure show a dramatically smaller response to acute pollution episodes, with the most chronically exposed experiencing approximately 40 percent smaller productivity losses than those with median exposure histories.His findings suggest that standard estimates from low-pollution environments poorly capture the dynamics between short- and long-term exposure in high-pollution settings, with important implications for environmental regulation in developing economies where chronic exposure is widespread.

 

Stuart presented his ongoing work, co-authored with ARE PhD candidate Dan Schuurman, entitled "The Old Plants and the Sea: Did a policy to protect marine life hurt California’s electricity market?" Stuart and Dan aim to analyze the effect of the moratorium of once-through cooling of California’s aging coastal power plants. They are interested in whether the policy had its intended effect of protecting marine life - particularly in larval stages - as well as unintended consequences in the electricity market of early power plant closure and reduced summer capacity.