Killer Cities: Past and Present

Hanlon, W. Walker; Tian, Yuan

doi:10.1257/aer.p20151071

Cited by 25 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…They also find a negative association between city-level particulate air pollution exposure and life expectancy that is driven by elevated cardiorespiratory mortality rates: for example, a 100 µg/m 3 increase in PM 10 exposure is associated with a decline in life expectancy of 1.5 years at birth and 2.3 years at age five. Hanlon and Tian (2015) use cross-city data in modern China and in late 19th-century England to study the relationship between polluting industry agglomeration and mortality. In both settings, there is a positive correlation between heavy industry and death risk, although modern China's gradient is less steep than the relationship found in historical England.…”

Section: The Health Costs Of China's Pollutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Era of Pollution Progress in Urban China?

Zheng

Kahn

2017

Journal of Economic Perspectives

161

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Over the last 30 years, China's economy has boomed. This trend has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty but it has also sharply increased local, regional, and global pollution levels. We look at the rise in air pollution over recent decades, and the perhaps surprising finding that in many of China's urban areas, levels of particulates (of less than 10 microns) have been decreasing during the last 10 to 15 years. We then turn to the costs and tradeoffs of air pollution, including costs to human health, reductions in worker productivity, and how people are seeking to reduce their exposure to pollution as shown by compensating differentials in real estate prices and purchases of masks and air filters. We discuss how rising incomes tend to raise the demand for environmental amenities and thus increase political pressure for environmental protection, and then we turn to the policy tools that China has used to reduce pollution. We conclude by arguing that as China's government is preparing for an additional 300 million people to move to urban areas over the next 30 years, it will have a number of opportunities for China to reduce pollution through a shift from manufacturing to services, along with various steps to improve energy efficiency and resource conservation. Overall, it seems that China is on track to improve its environmental performance in the years ahead.

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Section: The Health Costs Of China's Pollutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Era of Pollution Progress in Urban China?

Zheng

Kahn

2017

Journal of Economic Perspectives

161

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“…3 Third, we study congestion effects in poor countries. Related studies are Rossi-Hansberg (2013, 2014), Duranton (2014a), Hanlon and Tian (2015), Hanlon (2016), Akbar and Duranton (2017), and Akbar et al (2018). Lastly, our quantitative analysis is able to deliver policy prescriptions.…”

Section: The Urban Mortality Transition and Poor-countrymentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Unified growth models The paper also contributes to the literature documenting demographic patterns over time (Jones and Tertilt 2006;Cutler, Huang, and Lleras-Muney 2016). Other studies of urban mortality have focused on England or the United States (Costa and Kahn 2006, Haines 2008, Hanlon and Tian 2015, Hanlon 2016.…”

Section: The Urban Mortality Transition and Poor-countrymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…City natural increase was still low on average at 5.0-6.1 per 1,000 people (0.5-0.6 percent per year). The samples include various emblematic cities of the Industrial Revolution, such as Boston, Liverpool, Manchester, New York, and Philadelphia (see panel C; 1880s), cities which all had high CDRs due to industrial pollution in addition to the factors listed in the previous paragraph (Williamson 1990, Steckel and Floud 1997, Haines 2004, Hanlon and Tian 2015, Hanlon 2016. Their growth, which averaged 3 percent per year in the nineteenth century, mostly occurred through in-migration (Williamson 1990;Jedwab, Christiaensen, and Gindelsky 2017).…”

Section: B the Urban Mortality Transition From Antiquity To The Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Urban Mortality Transition and Poor-Country Urbanization

Jedwab

Vollrath

2019

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

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Today, the world’s fastest-growing cities lie in low-income countries, unlike the historical norm. Also, unlike the “killer cities” of history, cities in low-income countries grow not just through in-migration but also through their own natural increase. First, we use novel historical data to document that many poor countries urbanized at the same time as the postwar urban mortality transition. Second, we develop a framework incorporating location choice with heterogeneity in demographics and congestion costs across locations to account for this. In the framework, people prefer to live in low-mortality locations, and the aggregate rate of population growth and the locational choice of individuals interact. Third, we calibrate this to data from a sample of poor countries and find that informal urban areas (e.g., slums) can absorb additional population more easily than other locations. We show that between 1950 and 2005 the urban mortality transition could have doubled the urbanization rate as well as the size of informal urban areas in this sample. Of these effects, one-third could be attributed to the amenity effect of lower urban mortality rates, while the remainder is due to higher population growth disproportionately pushing people into informal urban areas. Fourth, simulations suggest that family planning programs, as well as industrialization or urban infrastructure and institutions may be effective in slowing poor-country urbanization. (JEL I12, J11, N30, O15, O18, R11, R23)

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“…However, it is more polluted than London, Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas as figure 2 shows. Although we look at recent data, we are close to developed countries decades ago, as well as China and India years ahead (HANLON;TIAN, 2015;CLAY;LEWIS;SEVERNINI, 2016).…”

Section: Figure 1 -Hospital Beds and Physicians Per 1000 Inhabitantsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Air pollution consequences in São Paulo: evidence for health

Guidetti¹

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Air pollution causes negative externalities on human health, especially on vulnerable groups such as children. We look at hospitalizations due to respiratory diseases for children in São Paulo Metropolitan Area (SPMA) between 2015 and 2017 as consequence of variation in particulate matter (PM 10) levels. We use wind speed as instrument for PM to deal with the endogeneity of air pollution exposure, considering that non-stationary sources of pollution are predominant in the region, which is among the ten largest metropolitan areas in the world. The results show that air pollution positively affects hospitalizations due to all respiratory, pneumonia and asthma in the short term for children between one and five years old. For infant, we only find impact on influenza admission. Additional results suggest the Brazilian public health system is absorbing the increase in hospitalization due to this health shock. Furthermore, delay to visit the hospital may be underestimating our results. We also run a multi-pollutant model, including ozone (O3) as pollutant and solar radiation as instrument. Our coefficients of PM 10 are robust to this specification and we find no impact of O3 on health.

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Killer Cities: Past and Present

Cited by 25 publications

References 14 publications

A New Era of Pollution Progress in Urban China?

A New Era of Pollution Progress in Urban China?

The Urban Mortality Transition and Poor-Country Urbanization

Air pollution consequences in São Paulo: evidence for health

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