(Re)scheduling pollution exposure: The case of surgery schedules

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Huang, Jialin; Xing, Jianwei; Zou, Eric Yongchen
• 署名单位: University of International Business & Economics; Peking University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104825
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: O13; Q53; C44 I18

摘要

Many human activities can be strategically timed around forecastable natural hazards to mute their impacts. We study air pollution shock mitigation in a high-stakes healthcare setting: hospital surgery scheduling. Using newly available inpatient surgery records from a major city in China, we track post-surgery survival for over 1 million patients, and document a significant increase of hospital mortality among those who underwent surgeries on days with high particulate matter pollution. This effect has two important features. First, pollution on the surgery day, rather than exposure prior to hospitalization, before or after the surgery, primarily explains the excess mortality. Second, a small but high-risk group - elderly patients undergoing respiratory or cancer operations - bears a majority of pollution's damages. Based on these empirical findings, we analyze a model of hospital surgery scheduling. For over a third of the high-risk surgeries, there exists an alternative, lower-pollution day within three days such that moving the surgery may lead to a Pareto improvement in survival.1 (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.