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

Tatyana Deryugina, Garth Heutel, Nolan H. Miller, David Molitor and Julian Reif

No 22796, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 and a novel instrument for air pollution: changes in local wind direction. We develop a new approach that uses machine learning to estimate the life-years lost due to pollution exposure and show that our procedure reduces bias relative to previous methods. 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-codes: I1 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-hea
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Published as Tatyana Deryugina & Garth Heutel & Nolan H. Miller & David Molitor & Julian Reif, 2019. "The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction," American Economic Review, vol 109(12), pages 4178-4219.

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Journal Article: The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction (2019)
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