Mortality, Temperature, and Public Health Provision: A Comment on Cohen and Dechezlepretre (2022)
Cohen and Dechezlepretre (2022) investigate the heterogeneous impact of temperature on mortality across Mexico, and how affordable health care services that target the low-income population attenuate the mortality effects of weather events.They find that while extreme temperatures are more dangerous than less extreme temperatures, the increased frequency of non-extreme
temperatures mean these temperatures cause more deaths. First, were produce the paper’s main findings, uncovering a minor coding error that has a trivial effect on the main results. Second, we test the robustness of the results to clustering at the state level, omitting precipitation, and using a different weighting scheme. The original results are robust to all of these changes.
JEL-Klassifikation: I12, I13, I14, O13, O14, Q54