Logo image
Back
Economic impacts of California's heat illness prevention policy
Letter/Communication   Open access   Peer reviewed

Economic impacts of California's heat illness prevention policy

Tina Duong T Nguyen, Joe Simeone, Alina Schnake-Mahl and Leah H Schinasi
Environmental research letters, v 21(15), 154008
17 Jul 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae8c56
url
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae8c56View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

heat exposure economic productivity occupational health policy climate adaptation California quasi-experimental fixed effects
Background: Mounting evidence indicates that heat stress in the workplace compromises economic activity. Workplace heat safety laws may be critical adaptive responses to mitigate these impacts. We evaluated the impact of California’s 2005 Heat Illness Prevention law, the first state-level workplace heat safety policy enacted in the United States, on economic activity. Methods: We used county- and year-stratified, inflation-adjusted per-capita payroll in heat-exposed industries from the US Census Bureau’s Business Patterns Data to assess economic activity. We linked these to county- and yearly heat shocks (number of days that exceeded 27°C or 32°C), calculated using 4 km-resolution daily meteorological data from Oregon State University’s PRISM group. We used county-industry fixed effects linear regression models, adjusted for annual precipitation and cold shocks, to estimate associations between heat shocks and payroll per capita, before (2000-2004) and after (2005-2010) enactment of California’s heat illness prevention standard, in CA counties (N=58) compared with Oregon (OR) (N=36), where a policy did not exist. We stratified analyses by climate zone. Findings: In CA, each additional day that exceeded 27°C was associated with a 0.05% reduction in payroll per capita (95% CI: -0.17%, 0.08%), pre-policy enactment, and with a 0.07% increase in payroll per capita (95% CI: -0.07%, 0.20%), post-enactment. Associations were stronger in temperate counties. CA vs. OR associations, however, were not markedly different, and most estimates of association were imprecise. Conclusion: Although imprecise, this first-of-its-kind analysis provided suggestive evidence that workplace heat safety policies do not impair, and in some cases, may improve county-level economic activity. These results contribute to the ongoing debate over the adoption of workplace heat safety standards. Future studies in different settings and using more temporally granular data are needed to confirm these results.

Metrics

1 Record Views

Details

Logo image