Fellow Story
Temperatures Rise, and We're Cooked
Jisung Park's work was featured in a recent op-ed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
Until now, the focus [of climate change discussion] has been on rising seas, more intense hurricanes, acidification of oceans, drought and crop failures. But new studies are finding that some of the most important effects will be directly on our bodies and minds.
A clever new working paper by Jisung Park, a Ph.D. student in economics at Harvard, compared the performances of New York City students on 4.6 million exams with the day’s temperature. He found that students taking a New York State Regents exam on a 90-degree day have a 12 percent greater chance of failing than when the temperature is 72 degrees.
