Airports, Air Pollution, and Contemporaneous Health

Wolfram Schlenker and Reed Walker

No 17684, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Airports are some of the largest sources of air pollution in the United States. We demonstrate that daily airport runway congestion contributes significantly to local pollution levels and contemporaneous health of residents living nearby and downwind from airports. Our research design exploits the fact that network delays originating from large airports on the East Coast increase runway congestion in California, which in turn increases daily pollution levels around California airports. Using the component of California air pollution driven by airport congestion, we find that carbon monoxide (CO) leads to significant increases in hospitalization rates for asthma, respiratory, and heart related emergency room admissions that are an order of magnitude larger than conventional estimates: A one standard deviation increase in daily pollution levels leads to an additional $1 million in hospitalization costs for respiratory and heart related admissions for the 6 million individuals living within 10km (6.2 miles) of the 12 largest airports in California. While infants and the elderly are more sensitive to air pollution, we also find significant relationships for the adult population. The health impacts are driven by CO, not NO2 or O3, and occur at levels far below existing EPA mandates. Our results suggest there may be sizable morbidity benefits from lowering the existing CO standard.

JEL-codes: H0 I1 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-hea
Note: EEE EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Published as Wolfram Schlenker & W. Reed Walker, 2016. "Airports, Air Pollution, and Contemporaneous Health," The Review of Economic Studies, vol 83(2), pages 768-809.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17684.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Airports, Air Pollution, and Contemporaneous Health (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17684

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17684

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().