Air Pollution Consequences in São Paulo: Evidence for Health

Abstract

There is evidence in the literature that air pollution impacts health, especially of vulnerable people, however, there are few evidences for developing countries. The endogeneity of air pollution exposure, already consolidated in the literature, comes up as a problem to investigate its effects on health. Thus, this project of study proposes an instrumental variable approach to investigate the impacts of air pollution on the hospitalization rate for respiratory diseases in elderly and children in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region, instrumentalizing the local air pollution by the amount of pollutants brought by the wind.