The short-run impact of COVID-19 Pandemic and Stay-At-Home (SHO) policies on air pollution in USA

Abstract

This paper investigates the short-run effects of stay-at-home orders measured by policymakers on air pollution in USA, using daily air pollutants' data from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) database between 2018-2020 along with CDC's (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) database for stay-at-home orders' types and timing. Many recent studies worldwide find that the concentration of various air pollutants has decreased because of the pandemic and lockdown; however, few of them have analyzed causality. This paper has used a specific categorization of stay-at-home orders by grouping the orders into two major groups. 1) Strict-SHO, which includes the states with mandatory SHO orders; 2) Less-Strict SHO, which includes the states with non-mandatory SHO and no SHO issued states. The paper finds a causal relationship between a decrease in NO2, PM10 and AQI in states with Strict-SHO relative to states with Less-Strict SHO by 1.73, 2.75 and 1.12, respectively. Moreover, as secondary results, the impact of SHO on air pollution considering states’ GDP elaborate that O3 and AQI in states with Strict-SHO and High-GDP have decreased by .00346 and 2.0081 units relative to states with Low-GDP.