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Air pollution, mortality, at-risk population, new entry and life expectancy of the frail elderly in three U.S. cities

  • Christian J. Murray EMAIL logo and Frederick W. Lipfert
Published/Copyright: November 23, 2020
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Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics
From the journal Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics Volume 25 Issue 4

Abstract

We present the findings of a new time-series model that estimates short-term health effects of particulate matter and ozone, as applied to three U.S. cities. The model is based on observed fluctuations of daily death counts and estimates the corresponding daily subpopulations at-risk of imminent death; it also shows that virtually all elderly deaths are preceded by a brief period of extreme frailty. We augment previous research by allowing new entrants to this at-risk population to be influenced by the environment, rather than be random. The mean frail subpopulations in the three cities, each containing between 3000 and 5000 daily observations on mortality, pollution, and temperature, are estimated to be about 0.1% of those aged 65 or more, and their life expectancies in this frail status are about one week. We find losses in life expectancy due to air pollution and temperature to be at most one day. Air pollution effects on new entrants into the frail population tend to exceed those on mortality. Our results provide context to the many time-series studies that have found significant short-term relationships between air quality and survival, and they suggest that benefits of air quality improvement should be based on increased life expectancy rather than estimated numbers of excess deaths.

Keywords: life expectancy; mortality; nonlinear state space model; pollution
Corresponding author: Christian J. Murray, Department of Economics, University of Houston, 3623 Cullen Boulevard Room 204, Houston, Texas, USA, E-mail:

The authors thank the editor Bruce Mizrach, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

  1. Author contribution: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/snde-2019-0098).

Received: 2019-09-01
Accepted: 2020-10-30
Published Online: 2020-11-23

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/snde-2019-0098
Keywords for this article
life expectancy; mortality; nonlinear state space model; pollution

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Forecasting Japanese inflation with a news-based leading indicator of economic activities
  4. Air pollution, mortality, at-risk population, new entry and life expectancy of the frail elderly in three U.S. cities
  5. Fast maximum likelihood estimation of parameters for square root and Bessel processes
  6. A monitoring procedure for detecting structural breaks in factor copula models
  7. Construction of leading economic index for recession prediction using vine copulas
  8. Financial integration in emerging economies: an application of threshold cointegration
  9. When is discretionary fiscal policy effective?
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