The Health Care Cost of Air Pollution: Evidence from the World's Largest Payment Network

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Barwick, Panle Jia; Li, Shanjun; Rao, Deyu; Zahur, Nahim Bin
• 署名单位: University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Queens University - Canada
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6535
• DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01430
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: infant-mortality; distributed lag; CHINA; exposure; QUALITY; people; IMPACT

摘要

This paper exploits the universe of credit- and debit-card transactions in China during 2013-2015 and provides the first nationwide analysis of the health care cost of PM2.5 for a developing country. We leverage spatial spillovers of PM2.5 from long-range transport to generate exogenous variation in local pollution, and we employ a flexible distributed lag model to capture semiparametrically the dynamic response of pollution exposure. We find significant impacts of PM2.5 on health care spending in both the short and medium terms. A 10 mu g/m(3) decrease in PM2.5 would reduce annual health care spending by over $9.2 billion, about 1.5% of China's annual health care expenditure.