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

By T. Deryugina, Garth Heutel, Nolan H. Miller, D. Molitor, J. Reif. The American Economic Review, 2019

639 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac8ecfa7c60c7a28fefc1857aaf5b06968520c67

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. Nicolas R. Ziebarth
2. Sefi Roth
3. Lutz Sager
4. Malvina Bondy
5. Martin Karlsson

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. Sefi Roth
2. Malvina Bondy
3. Lutz Sager
4. Martin Karlsson
5. Nicolas R. Ziebarth

Citations in the corpus

• Air pollution, behavioral bias, and the disposition effect in China (2019, background): “6 More explicitly, pollution may adversely affect health conditions indicated by life expectancy and mortality (e.g., Chay and Greenstone, 2003a,b; Chen et al., 2013; Greenstone and Hanna, 2014; Ebenstein et al., 2015; Deryugina et al., 2016; Ebenstein et al., 2017); human capital issues related to ”
• East-Side Story: Historical Pollution and Persistent Neighborhood Sorting (2016, positive): “, 2014), violent crime (Herrnstadt and Muehlegger, 2015; Heyes and Saberian, 2015), and health (Graff Zivin and Neidell, 2013; Anderson, 2015; Deryugina et al., 2016) which relates to our research.”
• Air Quality and Manufacturing Firm Productivity: Comprehensive Evidence from China (2017, neutral): “Wind direction has been used as an instrument for air pollution in a few studies (Luechinger, 2009; Schlenker and Walker, 2011; Deryugina et al., 2016).”
• The Effect of Air Pollution on Migration: Evidence from China (2017, neutral): “These findings across age groups are consistent with prior literature on the effects of air pollution by age (Chen et al., 2013; Deryugina et al., 2019) and suggest that the bias caused by the measurement error in our net-outmigration measures should be minimal and statistically undetectable.”
• Population health effects and health-related costs of extreme temperatures: Comprehensive evidence from Germany (2018, background): “” The confounding impact of multiple pollutants is an important question of inquiry, particularly in the epidemiological literature (Katsouyanni et al., 2001; Dominici et al., 2010; Bobb et al., 2013; Deryugina et al., 2016).”
• Crime Is in the Air: The Contemporaneous Relationship between Air Pollution and Crime (2020, result): “By allowing the firststage effect of wind direction on air pollution to differ between regions our approach is similar to that of Deryugina et al. (2016), who study the short-term effect of fine particulate matter exposure on mortality and medical costs among the elderly in the United States.”