Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Deschênes, Olivier
• Greenstone, Michael
• Guryan, Jonathan

Titel

Climate Change and Birth Weight

Ist Teil von

• The American economic review, 2009-05, Vol.99 (2), p.211-217

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Economic Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This paper documents whether the temperature variation predicted to be part of climate change, including extreme high and low temperatures, historically has had negative health consequences through its effect on babies while in utero. Using individual-level data on more than 37.1 million births, it was found that exposure to extreme hot temperatures during pregnancy leads to lower birth weight. This finding is combined with estimates of the distribution of future daily temperatures from state-of-the-art climate change predictions. These predictions of the effect of climate change on the distribution of daily temperatures to estimate the predicted effect of global climate change on future birth weights by the end of the century. These estimates imply that mean birth weights will decrease on average by 0.22% among whites and by 0.36% for blacks by the end of the century.