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Behavioral Responses to Air Quality Information: Implications for Optimal Policy
Air quality alerts change outdoor activity, but the behavioral response depends on recent alert history. I combine quasi-experimental evidence with a model of alert policy to study how these dynamics affect the welfare-maximizing alert threshold.
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Air quality alerts can improve welfare by helping individuals avoid pollution exposure, but frequent warnings may reduce responsiveness and weaken the effectiveness of the alert system. This paper studies how people's outdoor activity responds to air quality alerts, how that response varies with recent alert history, and how these behavioral dynamics affect the optimal alert threshold. A model of optimal alert policy is combined with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design using air quality forecasts, alert issuances, and high-frequency foot traffic data from six U.S. metropolitan areas. Near the alert threshold, receiving an alert reduces daily visits to outdoor recreational points of interest by approximately 3.3 visits, or 9 percent relative to the sample mean. The response varies substantially with recent alert history: alerts reduce visits by roughly eight visits when one or two alerts have occurred during the previous seven days, but have little detectable effect after three or more recent alerts. A counterfactual simulation calibrated to New York City-specific pollution dynamics and behavioral responses places the welfare-maximizing alert threshold at approximately 80, below the current AQI threshold of 101. The results show that optimal warning policy depends not only on the pollution risks communicated by an alert, but also on how the frequency and sequencing of repeated warnings affect behavioral responsiveness.