Speaker: Clara Berestycki
Title: Pricing wildfire smoke avoidance: activity reallocation from mobility data
Abstract: This paper estimates the welfare cost of avoiding wildfire smoke during the 2018 Northern California fire season. Using individual smartphone location data, I construct daily ZIP-to-ZIP trip flows across activity types, including outdoor recreation, work, and other trips. I embed these flows in a nested logit model of activity participation and destination choice, with destination choice estimated as a gravity equation over a comprehensive choice set. Smoke deters both leaving home and visiting polluted locations. I find that people substitute away from smoky outdoor destinations, and that wildfire smoke shifts the composition of daily activities: the share of outdoor activities falls, but so do the shares of work and other trips. The welfare cost of this avoidance behavior is around $500M, adding 14% to the mortality burden of the same smoke. Air quality alerts increase avoidance, and under alert-level awareness of moderate smoke, welfare costs would be 20% higher.
