Noise and Productivity - Is There an Effect on Productivity?

productivity is an easier outcome, both to study and to then used to persuade people to care about the problem. There's this psychology literature that suggests possibly something like inhibiting attention or working memory. But it could also be something like reducing the effort of workers because they don't enjoy being put in noisy working conditions. And depending on what the mechanism is, that is going to lead to different conclusions about where we should expect this to matter and what the right policy response should be....