Back
Texte intégral
Journal article

The impact of ambient air pollution on hospital admissions

  • Filippini, Massimo Istituto di economia politica (IdEP), Facoltà di scienze economiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Masiero, Giuliano Istituto di economia politica (IdEP), Facoltà di scienze economiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Steinbach, Sandro Department of Management, Technology and Economics (D-MTEC), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Switzerland
    2019
Published in:
  • European Journal of Health Economics. - 2019, vol. 20, no. 6, p. 919-931
Ambient air pollution
dispersion model
hospital admissions
count panel data
English Ambient air pollution is the environmental factor with the most significant impact on human health. Several epidemiological studies provide evidence for an association between ambient air pollution and human health. However, the recent economic literature has challenged the identification strategy used in these studies. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion by investigating the association between ambient air pollution and morbidity using hospital admission data from Switzerland. Our identification strategy rests on the construction of geographically explicit pollution measures derived from a dispersion model that replicates atmospheric conditions and accounts for several emission sources. The reduced form estimates account for location and time fixed effects and show that ambient air pollution has a substantial impact on hospital admissions. In particular, we show that SO2 and NO2 are positively associated with admission rates for coronary artery and cerebrovascular diseases while we find no similar correlation for PM10 and O3. Our robustness checks support these findings and suggest that dispersion models can help in reducing the measurement error inherent to pollution exposure measures based on station-level pollution data. Therefore, our results may contribute to a more accurate evaluation of future environmental policies aiming at a reduction of ambient air pollution exposure.
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1319001
Statistics
Document views: 220 File downloads:
  • Texte intégral: 194