Mortality and Air Pollution: Revisited

Abstract

This paper represents an exploratory effort to estimate a physical nonlinear function between excess mortality rates and the SO₂ concentration with both considerations over econometric problems such as multicollinearity and heteroscedasticity (the residuals of regression analysis), and the threshold levels. Through a recursive and stepwise adjustment procedure, the average physical mortality function was generalized with much more complete specifications. That is, the generalized average mortality model includes not only the demographic, socioeconomic, and climatological determinants but also air pollution variable. The average pollution damage function developed in this study with observations from relevant SMSA’s which have pollution concentrations exceeding the threshold level represents an important departure from the prior studies in which sample observations were selected regardless of the SO₂ concentration level.