Abstract

Joint work with Till Seuring and Marc Suhrcke.

Climate change is expected to increase extreme weather events, including sustained periods of abnormally high temperatures relative to local historical norms. Exposure to high temperatures can strain the human body’s ability to maintain its optimal temperature (‘heat stress’), leading to morbidity and mortality or forcing individuals to reduce work effort in order to mitigate those health risks. A growing literature documents important economic effects of heat stress, but its focus lies mostly on tropical climates, market-valued outcomes and specific occupational settings. We explore if short-run exposure to high temperatures in a historically temperate climate has affected individual work effort in the general population over the last decade. We use panel data for England and Wales from the Understanding Society (US) survey and hourly temperature data from the Copernicus project covering the years 2010 to 2019. To identify the effect of heat exposure on productivity, we link indicators based on different types of daily average temperatures at the respondents’ place of residence, to a binary self-reported measure of health-related reductions in work effort (‘presenteeism’) during the 4 weeks before the interview. We explore a large set of indicators, based on temperature bins or thresholds – in the latter case, with and without adjustment for intensity and duration of exposure. Quasi-Poisson fixed-effects estimates of additional days (or degrees) spent above a set of increasing temperature thresholds retrieve dose-response relationships for selected sub-samples, suggesting up to a doubling in the incidence of presenteeism. Stratifications show that the effect is concentrated on people working in occupations with a low job MET score, an indicator of the average physical demands within each occupation. These findings indicate that, even in temperate climates, heat exposure can lead to immediate health-related reductions in productivity in market and nonmarket activities.