A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Cause, conseguenze e strategie di mitigazione Proponiamo il primo di una serie di articoli in cui affronteremo l’attuale problema dei mutamenti climatici. Presentiamo il documento redatto, votato e pubblicato dall’Ipcc - Comitato intergovernativo sui cambiamenti climatici - che illustra la sintesi delle ricerche svolte su questo tema rilevante.

/pdf/climate-change-2007-the-physical-science-basis-1x93ttz9jt.pdf

Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.

The Lancet Commission on pollution and health

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides access to information on a variety of topics related to the environment and strives to inform citizens of health risks. The EPA also has an extensive library network that consists of 26 libraries throughout the United States, which provide access to a plethora of information to EPA employees, scientists, and researchers. The EPA implemented a reorganization project to digitize their materials so they would be more accessible to a wider range of users, but this plan was drastically accelerated when the EPA was threatened with a budget cut. It chose to close and reduce the hours and services of some of their libraries. As a result, the agency was accused of denying users the “right to know” by making information unavailable, not providing an adequate strategic plan, and discarding vital materials. This case study explores the background of the digitization project, the practices implemented, and the critiques of the project.

/pdf/the-environmental-protection-agency-3gx4opzrjm.pdf

The Environmental Protection Agency

www.mobilehealthmap.org 617‐442‐3200 New research shows that mobile health clinics improve health outcomes for hard to reach populations in cost‐effective and culturally competent ways . A Harvard Medical School study determined that for every dollar invested in a mobile health clinic, the US healthcare system saves $30 on average. Mobile health clinics, which offer a range of services from preventive screenings to asthma treatment, leverage their mobility to treat people in the convenience of their own communities. For example, a mobile health clinic in Baltimore, MD, has documented savings of $3,500 per child seen due to reduced asthma‐related hospitalizations. The estimated 2,000 mobile health clinics across the country are providing similarly cost‐effective access to healthcare for a wide range of populations. Many successful mobile health clinics cite their ability to foster trusting relationships. Qualitative research in such mobile health clinics has found that patients value the informal, familiar environment in a convenient location, with staff who “are easy to talk to,” and that the staff’s “marriage of professional and personal discourses” provides patients the space to disclose information themselves. A communications academic argued that mobile health clinics’ unique use of space is important in facilitating these relationships. Mobile health clinics park in the heart of the community in familiar spaces, like shopping centers or bus stations, which lend themselves to the local community atmosphere.

Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care

As one of the primary factors of production, labor is an essential element in every nation's economy. Investing in human capital is widely viewed as a key to sustaining increases in labor productivity and economic growth. While health is increasingly seen as an important part of human capital, environmental protection, which typically promotes health, has not been viewed through this lens. Indeed, such interventions are typically cast as a tax on producers and consumers, and thus a drag on the labor market and the economy in general. Given the large body of evidence that causally links pollution with poor health outcomes (e.g., Bell et al. 2004; Chay and Greenstone 2003; Currie and Neidell 2005; Dockery et al. 1993; Pope et al. 2002), it seems plausible that efforts to reduce pollution could in fact also be viewed as an investment in human capital, and thus a tool for promoting, rather than retarding, economic growth.

The key to this assertion lies in the impacts of pollution on labor market outcomes. While a handful of studies have documented impacts of pollution on labor supply (Carson, Koundouri, and Nauges 2011; Graff Zivin and Neidell forthcoming; Hanna and Oliva 2011; Hausman, Ostro, and Wise 1984; Ostro 1983),1 their focus on the extensive margin, where behavioral responses are nonmarginal, only captures high-visibility labor market impacts. Pollution is also likely to have productivity impacts on the intensive margin, even in cases where labor supply remains unaffected. Since worker productivity is more difficult to monitor than labor supply, these more subtle impacts may be pervasive throughout the workplace, so that even small individual effects may translate into large welfare losses when aggregated across the economy. There is, however, no systematic evidence to date on the direct impact of pollution on worker productivity.2 This paper is the first to rigorously assess this environmental productivity effect.

Estimation of this relationship is complicated for two reasons. One, although datasets frequently measure output per worker, these measures do not isolate worker productivity from other inputs (i.e., capital and technology), so that obtaining clean measures of worker productivity is a perennial challenge. Two, exposure to pollution levels is typically endogenous. Since pollution is capitalized into housing prices (Chay and Greenstone 2005), individuals may sort into areas with better air quality depending, in part, on their income, which is a function of their productivity (Banzhaf and Walsh 2008). Furthermore, even if ambient pollution is exogenous, individuals may respond to ambient levels by reducing time spent outside, so that their exposure to pollution is endogenous (Neidell 2009).

In this paper, we use a unique panel dataset on the productivity of agricultural workers to overcome these challenges in analyzing the impact of ozone pollution on productivity. Our data on daily worker productivity is derived from an electronic payroll system used by a large farm in the Central Valley of California that pays its employees through piece rate contracts. A growing body of evidence suggests that piece rates reduce shirking and increase productivity over hourly wages and relative incentive schemes, particularly in agricultural settings (Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul 2005, 2010; Lazear 2000; Paarsch and Shearar 1999, 2000; Shi 2010). Given the incentives under these contracts, our measures of productivity can be viewed as a reasonable proxy for productive capacity under typical work conditions.

We conduct our analysis at a daily level to exploit the plausibly exogenous daily fluctuations in ambient ozone concentrations. Although aggregate variation in environmental conditions is largely driven by economic activity, daily variation in ozone is likely to be exogenous. Ozone is not directly emitted but forms from complex interactions between nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), both of which are directly emitted, in the presence of heat and sunlight. Thus, ozone levels vary in part because of variations in temperature, but also because of the highly nonlinear relationship with NOx and VOCs. For example, the ratio of NOx to VOCs is almost as important as the level of each in affecting ozone levels (Auffhammer and Kellogg 2011), so that small decreases in NOx can even lead to increases in ozone concentrations, which has become the leading explanation behind the “ozone weekend effect” (Blanchard and Tanenbaum 2003). Moreover, regional transport of NOx from distant urban locations, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, has a tremendous impact on ozone levels in the Central Valley (Sillman 1999). Given the limited local sources of ozone precursors, this suggests that the ozone formation process coupled with emissions from distant urban activities are the driving forces behind the daily variation in environmental conditions observed near this farm.

Furthermore, the labor supply of agricultural workers is highly inelastic in the short run. Workers arrive at the field in crews and return as crews, thus spending the majority of their day outside regardless of environmental conditions. Moreover, since we have measures of both the decision to work and the number of hours worked, we can test whether workers respond to ozone, and in fact we are able to rule out even small changes in avoidance behavior. Thus, focusing on agricultural workers greatly limits the scope for avoidance behavior, further ensuring that exposure to pollution is exogenous in this setting, and that we are detecting productivity impacts on the intensive margin.

Although these workers are paid through piece-rate contracts, worker compensation is subject to minimum wage rules, which can alter the incentive for workers to supply costly effort. Since the minimum wage decouples daily job performance from compensation, workers may have an incentive to shirk. If pollution leads to more workers earning the minimum wage, and this in turn induces shirking, linear regression estimates will be upward biased. On the other hand, the threat of termination may provide a sufficient incentive to provide effort, particularly in our setting where output is easily verified and labor contracts are extremely short-lived, in which case linear regression models should be unbiased.

After merging this worker data with environmental conditions based on readings from air quality and meteorology stations in the California air monitoring network, we first estimate linear models that relate mean ozone concentrations during the typical workday to productivity. We find that ozone levels well below federal air quality standards have a significant impact on productivity: a 10 parts per billion (ppb) decrease in ozone concentrations increases worker productivity by 5.5 percent. To account for potential concerns about shirking, we artificially induce “bottom- coding” on productivity measures for observations where the minimum wage binds, and estimate censored regression models. Under this specification, the actual measures of productivity when the minimum wage binds no longer influence estimates of the impact of ozone on productivity. Thus, if the marginal effects of productivity on this latent variable differ from the marginal effects from our baseline linear model, this would indicate shirking is occurring. Our results, however, remain unchanged, suggesting that the threat of termination provides sufficient incentives for workers to supply effort even when compensation is not directly tied to output.

These impacts are particularly noteworthy as the US Environmental Protection Agency is currently contemplating a reduction in the federal ground-level ozone standard of approximately 10 ppb (Environmental Protection Agency 2010). The environmental productivity effect estimated in this paper offers a novel measure of morbidity impacts that are both more subtle and more pervasive than the standard health impact measures based on hospitalizations and physician visits. Moreover, they have the advantage of already being monetized for use in the regulatory cost-benefit calculations required by Executive Order 12866 (The White House, 1994). In developing countries, where environmental regulations are typically less stringent and agriculture plays a more prominent role in the economy, this environmental productivity effect may have particularly detrimental impacts on national prosperity.

The paper is organized as follows. Section I briefly summarizes the relationship between ozone and health, and highlights potentially important confounders. Section II describes the piece-rate and environmental data. Section III provides a conceptual framework that largely serves to guide our econometric model, which is described in Section IV. Section V describes the results, with a conclusion provided in Section VI.

/pdf/the-impact-of-pollution-on-worker-productivity-22ezk5spgq.pdf

The Impact of Pollution on Worker Productivity

We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s Our work offers several innovations: First, many previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution In contrast, the experience of California in the 1990s is clearly relevant to current debates over the regulation of pollution Second, many studies examine a few routinely monitored pollutants in isolation, generally because of data limitations We examine four criteria' pollutants in a common framework Third, we develop an identification strategy based on within zip code variation in pollution levels that controls for potentially important unobserved characteristics of high pollution areas Fourth, we use rich individual-level data to investigate effects of pollution on infant mortality, fetal deaths, low birth weight and prematurity in a common framework We find that the reductions in carbon monoxide (CO) and particulates (PM10) over the 1990s in California saved over 1,000 infant lives However, we find little consistent evidence of pollution effects on fetal deaths, low birth weight or short gestation

Air Pollution and Infant Health: What Can We Learn from California's Recent Experience

https://www.csiss.org/events/meetings/spatial-interactions/files/neidell.pdf

Air pollution, health, and socio-economic status: the effect of outdoor air quality on childhood asthma

We estimate the impacts of temperature on time allocation by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in temperature over time within counties. Temperature increases at the higher end of the distribution reduce hours worked in industries with high exposure to climate and reduce time allocated to outdoor leisure for the nonemployed, with this time reallocated to indoor leisure. At the lower end of the distribution, time allocated to labor is nonresponsive to temperature increases, but outdoor leisure increases while indoor leisure decreases as temperature warms. We also find suggestive evidence of short-run adaptation to higher temperatures through temporal substitutions and acclimatization.

/pdf/temperature-and-the-allocation-of-time-implications-for-51amngh7ey.pdf

Temperature and the Allocation of Time: Implications for Climate Change

We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s. Our work offers several innovations: First, many previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution. In contrast, the experience of California in the 1990s is clearly relevant to current debates over the regulation of pollution. Second, many studies examine a few routinely monitored pollutants in isolation, generally because of data limitations. We examine four criteria' pollutants in a common framework. Third, we develop an identification strategy based on within zip code variation in pollution levels that controls for potentially important unobserved characteristics of high pollution areas. Fourth, we use rich individual-level data to investigate effects of pollution on infant mortality, fetal deaths, low birth weight and prematurity in a common framework. We find that the reductions in carbon monoxide (CO) and particulates (PM10) over the 1990s in California saved over 1,000 infant lives. However, we find little consistent evidence of pollution effects on fetal deaths, low birth weight or short gestation.

/pdf/air-pollution-and-infant-health-what-can-we-learn-from-3xf9ab11zg.pdf

Matthew Neidell

Papers

The Impact of Pollution on Worker Productivity

Air Pollution and Infant Health: What Can We Learn from California's Recent Experience

Air pollution, health, and socio-economic status: the effect of outdoor air quality on childhood asthma

Temperature and the Allocation of Time: Implications for Climate Change

Air Pollution and Infant Health: What Can We Learn from California's Recent Experience?