Recent Increases in Air Pollution: Evidence and Implications for Mortality
Open accessAbstract
After declining by 24.2% from 2009 to 2016, annual average fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the United States in counties with monitors increased by 5.5% between 2016 and 2018. Increases occurred in multiple census regions and in counties that were in and out of attainment with National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). We explore channels through which the increase may have occurred including increases in economic activity, increases in wildfires, and decreases in Clean Air Act enforcement actions. The health implications of this increase in PM2.5 between 2016 and 2018 are significant. The increase was associated with 9, 700 additional premature deaths in 2018. At conventional valuations, these deaths represent damages of $89 billion.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
An increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires is contributing to a recent increase in PM2.5 concentrations in the western US after a decades-long reduction in air pollution.
“An increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires is contributing to a recent increase in PM 2.5 concentrations in the western US after a decades-long reduction in air pollution.4,[31][32][33][34]”
From Association of Wildfire Air Pollution and Health Care Use for Atopic Dermatitis and Itch (2021) · cites this paper as [4]
Section 4.2 (Wildfires; page unavailable) says wildfires may account for some of the 2016–2018 PM2.5 increase in the West, but not the overall decline-and-reversal pattern. The Introduction describes the preceding decline as roughly a decade, not decades, and the paper does not establish that wildfires increased in both frequency and severity. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Krewski, D. R., Jerrett, M., Burnett, R. T., Ma, R., Hughes, E., Shi, Y., Turner, M. C., Pope, C. A., Thurston, G. D., Calle, E. E., et al. (2009) · PubMed · Cited by 1,014 · see citing works
The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction
Deryugina, T., Heutel, G., Miller, N., Molitor, D., & Reif, J. (2019) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.20180279 · Cited by 763 · see citing works
Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy
Muller, N. Z., Mendelsohn, R. O., & Nordhaus, W. D. (2011) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.101.5.1649 · Cited by 499 · see citing works
Self-citationBoosting GDP growth by accounting for the environment
Muller, N. Z. (2014) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1253506 · Cited by 106 · see citing works
Self-citationAir Pollution and the Labor Market: Evidence from Wildfire SmokePreprint
Borgschulte, M., Molitor, D., & Zou, E. (2022) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4141995 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Association of Wildfire Air Pollution and Health Care Use for Atopic Dermatitis and Itch
Fadadu, R. P., Grimes, B., Jewell, N. P., Vargo, J., Young, A. T., Abuabara, K., Balmes, J. R., & Wei, M. L. (2021) · JAMA Dermatology · doi:10.1001/jamadermatol.2021.0179 · Cited by 120 · see citing works
- Authors
- Clay, K., & Muller, N.
- Affiliations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (US)
- Venue
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Publisher
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Published
- 2019-10
- OpenAlex
- W2980776304
- Cited by
- 51
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 17
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.nber.org
- Locations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis › Air Quality and Health Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Environmental Engineering › Environmental and Air Quality Management
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Atmospheric chemistry and aerosols
- Keywords
- air pollution, PM2.5, particulate matter, air quality trends, premature mortality, health damage, forest fires, National Ambient Air Quality Standards, economic activity, air quality monitoring, United States counties
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
