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Bounds, Benefits, and Bad Air: Welfare Impacts of Pollution Alerts / Michael L. Anderson, Minwoo Hyun, Jaecheol Lee.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Anderson, Michael L.
- Series:
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29637.
- NBER working paper series no. w29637
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.
- Summary:
- Though air-quality alert systems (AQAS) cover more than 1.7 billion people worldwide, there has been little welfare analysis of these systems. This paper presents a theoretical framework for deriving lower bounds on the net benefits of an AQAS and applies it to a South Korean system currently covering over 51 million people. Estimating a regression discontinuity design, we find that an alert issuance reduced youth respiratory expenditures by 30% and adult cardiovascular expenditures by 23%. The overall system reduced externalized health expenditures by 28.6 million dollars during 2016-2017, with a minimum benefit-cost ratio of 7.1:1. Including dynamic impacts of alerts increases the minimum benefits (benefit-cost ratio) to 36.7 million dollars (9.2:1). Our findings imply that the AQAS generates significant net benefits and suggests that manipulation of air quality data, which has been observed in other contexts, may negatively impact social welfare.
- Notes:
- Print version record
- January 2022.
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