The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Deryugina T
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7080189 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction.
Deryugina Tatyana T Heutel Garth G Miller Nolan H NH Molitor David D Reif Julian J
The American economic review 20191201 12
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 mort ...[more]
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