Environment, Health, and Human Capital
这篇综述总结了经济学家在环境与个人福祉关系上的三大贡献：因果识别污染效应、规避行为的作用，以及将分析扩展到人力资本指标。对关注环境政策、健康影响和经济增长的研究者有用。
In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to nonrandom assignment of pollution, economists have employed a wide range of quasi-experimental techniques to develop causal estimates of the effect of pollution. Second, economic research has placed a considerable focus on the role of avoidance behavior, which is an important component for understanding the difference between biological and behavioral effects of pollution and for proper welfare calculations. Lastly, economic research has expanded the focus of analysis beyond traditional health outcomes to include measures of human capital, including labor supply, productivity, and cognition. Our review of the quasi-experimental evidence on this topic suggests that pollution does indeed have a wide range of effects on individual well-being, even at levels well below current regulatory standards. Given the importance of health and human capital as an engine for economic growth, these findings underscore the role of environmental conditions as an important factor of production.