Air pollution impacts decision-making — it can cause corporate professionals to commit errors affecting their company: Juan Palacios
Juan Palacios is Director of the CRE Climate and Real Estate Initiative at MIT. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das, he discusses how professional work choices can be affected by PM2.5:
Q. What is the core of your research?
A.
The focus of my work is understanding how buildings and indoor environments impact us — this includes health and wellbeing in multiple ways which are also important economically, as in labour market and financial outcomes. I’ve researched how homes, schools and workplaces, through poor building, ventilation systems, etc., can lead to impaired learning and damaged health and performance outcomes. I use econometric techniques and economic theory to study this — air quality is a core focus here.
Q. Can you tell us about your research on air pollution, cognition and decisionmaking by professionals?
A.
This project fills the gap in thinking about how corporate workers specifically are impaired by air pollution and particularly by fine particulate matter (PM2.5). So far, the literature explored how blue-collar workers are affected in sectors like agriculture, construction and factory production, where workers evidently perform worse with high outdoor levels of PM2.5, ozone, etc.
In these sectors though, productivity is measured by the tasks you can finish in a given time. But with white-collar workers, those metrics change — a lot of professional work involves making multiple decisions during a day.
Key office occupiers now are often managers making high-stakes decisions, from launching products to navigating markets or deepening sustainability operations. Such decisions involve multiple discussions and then, challenging choices. We studied what could shape the performance of managers making such decisions
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