Air pollution, avoidance behaviors, and neglected social costs : evidence from outdoor leisure and commuting behaviors

The social cost of air pollution depends on both its biophysical impacts on health and productivity and the dynamic avoidance behaviors citizens proactively adopt. The literature has almost exclusively focused on the direct impacts, and the limited research looking into the avoidance behaviors has only considered monetary defensive expenditure. Building upon a theoretical framework incorporating the broader pollution costs into existing economic models, I derive empirical evidence of the hidden opportunity cost and social cost of pollution avoidance behaviors. For opportunity cost, I focus on the foregone outdoor leisure activities and the related welfare loss due to pollution avoidance, relying on billions of cell phone location inquiries from 10,499 parks all over China. Using the pollution blown from upwind cities as the instrumental variable for local pollution, I show that heavy PM2.5 pollution reduces park visitation by 10% in northern Chinese cities.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Fan, Yichun(Urban city planner)Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Siqi Zheng.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127590

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127590