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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	The American economic review Vol. 109; no. 12; p. 4178
Main Authors:	Deryugina, Tatyana, Heutel, Garth, Miller, Nolan H, Molitor, David, Reif, Julian
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States 01.12.2019
Subjects:	I12 J14 Q51 Q53
ISSN:	0002-8282
Online Access:	Get more information
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Summary:	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.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0002-8282
DOI:	10.1257/aer.20180279