Hazed and Confused: The Effect of Air Pollution on Dementia

Abstract

We find that long-term exposure to fine-particulate air pollution (PM2.5) degrades health and human capital among older adults by increasing their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. We track U.S. Medicare beneficiaries’ cumulative residential exposures to PM2.5 and their health from 2004 through 2013, leveraging within- and between-county quasi-random variation in PM2.5 resulting from the expansion of Clean Air Act regulations. We find that a 1 ig/m3 increase in decadal PM2.5 increases the probability of a dementia diagnosis by 1.68 percentage points. The effects are as large or larger when we adjust for mortality-based sample selection and additional Tiebout-sorting dynamics. We do not find relationships between decadal PM2.5 and placebo outcomes. Our estimates suggest that the federal regulation led to nearly 182,000 fewer people with dementia in 2013, yielding $214 billion in benefits. Further, PM2.5’s effect on dementia persists below the current regulatory thresholds.