Economics Assignment

ECON 3815 Assignment

Submitted on March 20, 2015

Li Wang

3392714

Question 1:

Author: Katharina Janke

Title: “Air pollution, avoidance behavior and children’s respiratory health: Evidence from England"

Name of journal: Journal of Health Economics

Volume, issue: Volume 38, December 2014

Page numbers: 23-42

Website:http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.hil.unb.ca/science/article/pii/S0167629614000940

Question 2:

Children are especially vulnerable to air pollution exposure because of their developing lungs and immature immune systems and because they spend more time outdoors (World Health Organization – European Centre for Environment and Health, 2005) and respiratory disease is one of the leading causes of hospitalization of children. Nowadays, governments increasingly issue air quality information to enable vulnerable groups to avoid exposure. Avoidance behavior potentially biases estimates of the health effects of air pollutants, but avoidance behavior imposes a cost on individuals and therefore may not be taken in all circumstances. This paper exploits panel data at the English local authority level to estimate the relationship between children’s daily hospital emergency admissions for respiratory diseases and common air pollutants, while allowing for avoidance behavior in response to air pollution warnings (Janke K, 2014).The author concludes that for a period of 5 years, a 10% increase in NO2 or O3 increases the rate of hospital emergency admissions for respiratory diseases and symptoms in children aged 5–19 years by around 1%. The results are similar for asthma and acute respiratory infections, two subsets of respiratory diseases and symptoms.

Question 3:

The author estimates the following regression:

The author is simply estimating that hospital admissions (response variable) is caused by nitrogen dioxide（） and ozone(explanatory variable), while controlling for avoidance behavior by including an air pollution dummy variable () on the basis...