Working Paper: NBER ID: w18349
Authors: Eva O. Arceo-Gomez; Rema Hanna; Paulina Oliva
Abstract: Much of what we know about the marginal effect of pollution on infant mortality is derived from developed country data. However, given the lower levels of air pollution in developed countries, these estimates may not be externally valid to the developing country context if there is a nonlinear dose relationship between pollution and mortality or if the costs of avoidance behavior differs considerably between the two contexts. In this paper, we estimate the relationship between pollution and infant mortality using data from Mexico. We find that an increase of 1 parts per billion in carbon monoxide (CO) over the last week results in 0.0032 deaths per 100,000 births, while a 1 μg/m3 increase in particulate matter (PM10) results in 0.24 infant deaths per 100,000 births. Our estimates for PM10 tend to be similar (or even smaller) than the U.S. estimates, while our findings on CO tend to be larger than those derived from the U.S. context. We provide suggestive evidence that a non-linearity in the relationship between CO and health explains this difference.
Keywords: pollution; infant mortality; developing countries; developed countries; Mexico City
JEL Codes: O1; Q53
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| pollution (Q53) | infant mortality (J13) |
| 1% increase in PM10 (Q53) | infant mortality (J13) |
| 1% increase in CO (C29) | infant mortality (J13) |
| pollution (Q53) | neonatal deaths (J13) |