Air pollution and innovation
研究了欧洲977个地区细颗粒物浓度对专利发明的影响，发现空气污染减少相当于欧洲年均降幅时，专利发明增加1.2%，且考虑创新效应后空气污染的经济成本比先前评估高出约四分之三。
If air pollution harms innovation — and therefore future productivity — existing assessments of its economic cost are incomplete. We estimate the effect of fine particulate matter concentration on inventive output in 977 European regions. Exploiting thermal inversions and weather-induced ventilation of pollutants for identification, we find that a decrease in air pollution equivalent to the average yearly drop in Europe leads to 1.2% more patented inventions in a given region. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that accounting for the effect on innovation increases the economic cost of air pollution as assessed in prior work by about three quarters.