Research Seed Grant | 2008-2009

The Impact of Air Quality on the Productivity of Agricultural Workers

by Matthew Neidell (Health Policy and Management)

The proposed research will conduct a preliminary analysis of the impact of ambient air quality on the productivity of agricultural workers.  Agricultural workers spend the majority of their time outside and are exposed to disproportionate amounts of air pollution.  Furthermore, since agricultural workers are limited in their ability to respond to changing environmental conditions, this project focuses on a group where exposure is unlikely to systematically vary across individuals.  Moreover, the use of productivity as an outcome variable will provide a measure that can easily be translated into economic impacts.  The project involves estimating statistical models that relat air quality to various measures of productivity using a novel data set that merges observations on agricultural productivity with air quality and weather data.