The Effect of Wildland Fire Smoke on Absentee Rates
Until now very little work has been done to estimate the effect of wildfire smoke on employment. This paper starts to address that gap. Smoke data from the NOAA Hazard Mapping System, Smoke and Fire Product is matched to data on employment and hours worked from the Current Population Survey at the county level. The effect of smoke on hours worked is estimated. The results indicated that light smoke has no measurable impact on hours worked, medium smoke has a negative effect on hours worked, and heavy smoke has an ambiguous but small effect on hours worked. For medium smoke, one day of smoke reduces hours by 0.15 ± 0.05 %