Clearing the Way
Indoor Air Quality and Strategic Decision Making
Steffen Künn, Juan Palacios & Nico Pestel
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Decision making on the job is becoming increasingly important in the labor market, in which there is an unprecedented rise in demand for workers with problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. This paper investigates how indoor air quality affects the quality of strategic decision making based on data from official chess tournaments. Our main analysis relies on a unique data set linking the readings of air-quality monitors inside the tournament room to the quality of 30,000 moves, each of them objectively evaluated by a powerful artificial intelligence-based chess engine. The results show that poor indoor air quality hampers players’ decision making. We find that an increase in the indoor concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by 10 μg/m3 (corresponding to 75% of a standard deviation in our sample) increases a player’s probability of making an erroneous move by 26.3%. The decomposition of the effects by different stages of the game shows that time pressure amplifies the damage of poor air quality to the players’ decisions. We implement a number of robustness checks and conduct a replication exercise with analogous move-quality data from games in the top national league showing the strength of our results. The results highlight the costs of poor air quality for highly skilled professionals faced with strategic decisions under time pressure.
Green Bonds, Empty Promises
Quinn Curtis, Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati
University of Virginia Working Paper, February 2023
Abstract:
We examine the legal terms in the market for green bonds, debt instruments in which proceeds are earmarked, directly or indirectly, for projects with a positive environmental impact. Utilizing a sample of nearly 1000 bonds over the entire history of the market and supplementing this data with interviews with over 50 market participants and policymakers, we find a concerning lack of enforce ability of green promises. Moreover, these promises have been getting weaker over time. Green bonds often make vague commitments, exclude failures to live up to those commitments from default events, and disclaim an obligation to perform in other parts of the document. These shortcomings are known to market participants. Yet, demand for these instruments has been growing. We ask why green bond promises are so weak, while the same investors demand strong promises from the same issuers in other settings.
Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution
Anna Lea Albright & Peter Huybers
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 February 2023
Abstract:
Individual paintings by artists including Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch have been shown to depict specific atmospheric phenomena, raising the question of whether longer-term environmental change influences stylistic trends in painting. Anthropogenic aerosol emissions increased to unprecedented levels during the 19th century as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Western European cities, leading to an optical environment having less contrast and more intensity. Here, we show that trends from more figurative to impressionistic representations in J.M.W. Turner and Claude Monet’s paintings in London and Paris over the 19th century accurately render physical changes in their local optical environment. In particular, we demonstrate that changes in local sulfur dioxide emissions are a highly statistically significant explanatory variable for trends in the contrast and intensity of Turner, Monet, and others’ works, including after controlling for time trends and subject matter. Industrialization altered the environmental context in which Turner and Monet painted, and our results indicate that their paintings capture changes in the optical environment associated with increasingly polluted atmospheres during the Industrial Revolution.
Paper Meets Plastic: The Perceived Environmental Friendliness of Product Packaging
Tatiana Sokolova, Aradhna Krishna & Tim Döring
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Packaging waste makes up more than ten percent of the landfilled waste in the U.S. While consumers often want to make environmentally friendly product choices, we find that their perceptions of the environmental friendliness (PEF) of product packaging may systematically deviate from its objective environmental friendliness. Eight studies document the PEF bias whereby consumers judge plastic packaging with additional paper to be more environmentally friendly than identical plastic packaging without the paper. The PEF bias is driven by consumers’ “paper=good, plastic=bad” beliefs, and by proportional reasoning, wherein packaging with a greater paper-to-plastic proportion is judged as more environmentally friendly. We further show that the PEF bias impacts consumers’ willingness to pay and product choice. Importantly, this bias can be mitigated by a “minimal packaging sticker” intervention, which increases the environmental friendliness perceptions of plastic-only packaging, rendering plastic-packaged products to be preferable to their plastic-plus-paper-packaged counterparts. This research contributes to the packaging literature in marketing and to research on sustainability, while offering practical implications for managers and public policy officials.
Behavior Mediates the Health Effects of Extreme Wildfire Smoke Events
Sam Heft-Neal et al.
NBER Working Paper, February 2023
Abstract:
Air pollution is known to negatively affect a range of health outcomes. Wildfire smoke is an increasingly important contributor to air pollution, yet extreme smoke events are highly salient and could induce behavioral responses that alter health impacts. We combine geolocated data covering the near universe of 127 million emergency department (ED) visits in California with estimates of daily surface wildfire smoke PM2.5 concentrations and quantify how increasingly acute wildfire smoke events affect ED visits. Low or moderate levels of ambient smoke increase total visits by 1-1.5% in the week following exposure, but extreme smoke days reduce total visits by 6-9%, relative to a day with no smoke. Reductions persist for at least a month. Declines during extreme exposures are driven by diagnoses not thought to be acutely impacted by pollution, including accidental injuries, and come disproportionately from less insured populations. In contrast, health outcomes with the strongest physiological link to short-term air pollution increase dramatically: ED visits for asthma, COPD, and cough all increase by 30-110% in the week after one extreme smoke day. Because low and moderate smoke days vastly outweigh extreme smoke days in our sample, we estimate that smoke exposure was responsible for roughly 3,000 additional ED visits per year in CA from 2006-2017.
Doom Town, Nevada Test Site, and the Popular Imagination of Atomic Disaster
John Wills
Journal of American Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explores the effect of Doom Town, a civil defense experiment conducted at Nevada Test Site in March 1953 and May 1955, on American attitudes toward the atom. Initially conceived by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) as a means to progress knowledge and understanding of how to survive nuclear attack, the creation and destruction of two “Survival Towns” in the Nevadan desert instead accelerated national anxieties. My article looks at how local and national media negatively framed the two experiments, and how the public responded, with two specific images of Doom Town undermining public confidence in the atom: the ruined city (or homegrown Hiroshima) and the projected death of the American nuclear family.
A green and efficient technology to recover rare earth elements from weathering crusts
Gaofeng Wang et al.
Nature Sustainability, January 2023, Pages 81-92
Abstract:
Heavy rare earth elements (HREEs) such as Gd–Lu, Sc and Y are irreplaceable metals for a number of critical (including clean) technologies, but they are scarce. Ion-adsorption deposits, which form within weathering crusts, supply more than 95% of the global HREE demand. However, these deposits are currently mined via ammonium-salt-based leaching techniques that are responsible for severe environmental damage and show low recovery efficiency. As a result, the adoption of such techniques is restricted for REE mining, further exacerbating REE scarcity, which in turn could lead to supply chain disruptions. Here we report the design of an innovative REE mining technique, electrokinetic mining (EKM), which enables green, efficient and selective recovery of REEs from weathering crusts. Its feasibility is demonstrated via bench-scale, scaled-up and on-site field experiments. Compared with conventional techniques, EKM achieves ~2.6 times higher recovery efficiency, an ~80% decrease in leaching agent usage and a ~70% reduction in metallic impurities in the obtained REEs. As an additional benefit, the results point to an autonomous purification mechanism for REE enrichment, wherein the separation process is based on the mobility and reactivity diversity between REEs and metallic impurities. Overall, the evidence presented suggests that EKM is a viable mining technique, revealing new paths for the sustainable harvesting of natural resources.
Can invasive species lead to sedentary behavior? The time use and obesity impacts of a forest-attacking pest
Benjamin Jones
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Invasive species can significantly disrupt environmental quality and flows of ecosystem services and we are still learning about their multidimensional impacts to economic outcomes of interest. In this work, I use quasi-random US county detections of the invasive emerald ash borer (EAB), a forest-attacking pest, to investigate how invasive-induced deforestation can impact obesity rates and time spent on physical activity. Results suggest that EAB is associated with 1–4 percentage points (pp) (mean = 37.0%) annual losses of deciduous forest cover in infested counties. After EAB detection, obesity rates are higher by 2.5pp (mean = 24.7%) and daily minutes spent on physical activity are lower by 4.9 min (mean = 51.7 min), on average. I show that less time spent on outdoor sports and exercise is one possible, but not exclusive, mechanism. Nationwide, EAB is associated with $3.0 billion in annual obesity-related healthcare costs over 2002–2012, equivalent to approximately 1.2% of total annual US medical costs related to obesity. Results are supported by many robustness and falsification tests and an alternative IV specification. This work has policy implications for invasive species management and expands our understanding of invasive species impacts on additional economic outcomes of interest.