Identifying the indirect cost of work in high-heat conditions

The impact of excess heat on labor productivity and/or labor supply are a key contributor to the total economic impact of climate change on the macroeconomy. Previous studies do not adequately distinguish between the short run labor response to excess heat and indirect costs to health and well being, or quantify the additional indirect toll of extreme heat. Empirically, workers typically exceed international safety standard work hours under hot conditions, suggesting they are incurring indirect costs in order to reduce production losses. Here we take a simple agent-based perspective on this question, supposing that workers and their employers make this tradeoff optimally. Based on this and a few other simple assumptions we infer workplace heat impacts on human health and well being that may be an appreciable fraction of economic losses. This implies that current studies underestimate the true costs of workplace heat in the present, and especially, future climates.