The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction

Abstract

We estimate the causal effects of acute fine particulate matter exposure on mortality, health care use, and medical costs among the US elderly using Medicare data. We instrument for air pollution using changes in local wind direction and develop a new approach that uses machine learning to estimate the life-years lost due to pollution exposure. Finally, we characterize treatment effect heterogeneity using both life expectancy and generic machine learning inference. Both approaches find that mortality effects are concentrated in about 25 percent of the elderly population. (JEL I12, J14, Q51, Q53)

Mitigating the air pollution effect? The remarkable decline in the pollution-mortality relationship in Hong Kong

“…This estimate is substantially smaller than the IV estimate (1.77%) in Table 2, suggesting the potential attenuation bias in the fixed-effects models. These findings are consistent with several quasi-experimental studies (e.g., Schlenker and Walker, 2015;He et al 2016;Deryugina et al 2019), which also find that estimates of the air pollution effects obtained using a quasi-experimental design were much larger than estimates obtained from associational approaches.…”

“…As pollution from mainland China creates quasi-random shocks to HK's local air quality, we utilize this transboundary pollution to identify the air pollution effect. The identification strategy is similar in spirit to Jia and Ku (2018), Deryugina et al (2019), and Anderson (2019). Anderson (2015) and Deryugina et al (2019)…”

“…The identification strategy is similar in spirit to Jia and Ku (2018), Deryugina et al (2019), and Anderson (2019). Anderson (2015) and Deryugina et al (2019)…”

“…We use monthly data to avoid estimating the very short-term health effect (i.e., the effect of daily air pollution on mortality) for two reasons. First, many epidemiological studies have investigated the dynamic impacts of air pollution on health outcomes and a general finding is that air pollution can lead to worse health outcomes at a more aggregated level (e.g., Zeger, Dominici and Samet, 1999;Schwartz, 2000;Zanobetti et al, 2000;Zanobetti et al, 2002;Costa et al, 2017;Zanobetti and Schwartz, 2008;Deryugina et al, 2019). The reason is that people will develop more complex cardio-respiratory diseases with prolonged exposure to air pollution and the affected population will increase over time.…”

Did Haze Pollution Harm the Quality of Economic Development?—An Empirical Study Based on China’s PM2.5 Concentrations

“…Air pollution has been proven by extensive pathological and sociological studies to have a variety of negative effects on human health, such as shortening average life expectancy [15], increasing morbidities of respiratory diseases and lung cancer [16] as well as causing more premature deaths amongst the working population [17][18][19]. Therefore, air pollution may reduce the supply of labor by harming human health.…”