Air pollution and the airborne diseases: Evidence from China and Japan
研究利用中国新冠疫情数据和日本流感数据，结合流行病学模型和工具变量法，发现空气污染显著提高新冠日增长率，但对日本流感就诊影响不显著。
This paper estimates the impact of ambient air pollution on the two most economically costly airborne respiratory diseases, COVID-19 and influenza. Our methods incorporate the epidemiological Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered-Deceased (SIRD) model to construct the outcome of interest, the Instrumental Variable (IV) model to establish causality, and the Flexible Distributed Lag (FDL) model to capture dynamic effects. Analyzing data from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, we find that air pollution can significantly raise the daily growth rate of COVID-19. In contrast, air pollution shows small and statistically insignificant effects on influenza healthcare visits in Japan.