Fresh Air Eases Work - The Effect of Air Quality on Individual Investor Activity
Working Paper No. 24048 This paper shows that air quality has a significantly negative effect on the likelihood of individual investors to sit down, log in, and trade in their brokerage accounts controlling for investor-, weather-, traffic-, and market-specific factors. In perspective, a one standar...
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Published in | NBER Working Paper Series p. 24048 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Paper |
Language | English |
Published |
Cambridge
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
01.11.2017
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Working Paper No. 24048 This paper shows that air quality has a significantly negative effect on the likelihood of individual investors to sit down, log in, and trade in their brokerage accounts controlling for investor-, weather-, traffic-, and market-specific factors. In perspective, a one standard deviation increase in fine particulate matter leads to the same reduction in the probability of logging in and trading as a one standard deviation increase in sunshine. We document this effect for low levels of pollution that are commonly found throughout the developed world. As individual investor trading can be a proxy for everyday cognitively-demanding tasks such as office work, our findings suggest that the negative effects of pollution on white-collar work productivity are much more severe than previously thought. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate a negative impact of pollution on a measure of white-collar productivity at the individual level in a western country. |
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ISSN: | 0898-2937 |
DOI: | 10.3386/w24048 |