The Long-Term Impact of Military Service on Health: Evidence from World War II and Korean War Veterans

During the World War II and Korean War era, the U.S. military freely distributed cigarettes to overseas personnel and provided low-cost tobacco products on domestic military bases. In fact, even today the military continues to sell subsidized tobacco products on its bases. Using a variety of instrumental variables approaches to deal with nonrandom selection into the military and into smoking, we provide substantial evidence that cohorts with higher military participation rates subsequently suffered more premature mortality. More importantly, we show that a large fraction, 35 to 79 percent, of the excess veteran deaths due to heart disease and lung cancer are attributable to military-induced smoking.

The Economic Impacts of Climate Change: Evidence from Agricultural Output and Random Fluctuations in Weather

This paper measures the economic impact of climate change on US agricultural land by estimating the effect of random year-to-year variation in temperature and precipitation on agricultural profits. The preferred estimates indicate that climate change will increase annual profits by $1.3 billion in 2002 dollars (2002$) or 4 percent. This estimate is robust to numerous specification checks and relatively precise, so large negative or positive effects are unlikely. We also find the hedonic approach—which is the standard in the previous literature—to be unreliable because it produces estimates that are extremely sensitive to seemingly minor choices about control variables, sample, and weighting. (JEL L25, Q12, Q51, Q54)

Extreme Weather Events, Mortality, and Migration

We estimate the effect of extreme weather on life expectancy in the United States. Using high-frequency data, we find that both extreme heat and cold result in immediate increases in mortality. The increase in mortality following extreme heat appears mostly driven by near-term displacement, while the increase in mortality following extreme cold is long lasting. We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 0.8% of average annual deaths in our sample. The longevity gains associated with mobility from the Northeast to the Southwest account for 4% to 7% of the total gains in life expectancy experienced by the U.S. population over the past thirty years. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.