Seminar: Does when you die depend on where you live? Evidence from Hurricane Katrina

Speaker bio:
David Molitor is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research explores factors that shape health and health care delivery in the United States, with a focus on physician behavior, technology adoption, and environmental adaptation.

Abstract:
We follow Medicare cohorts over time and space to estimate Hurricane Katrina’s long-run mortality effects on elderly and disabled victims initially living in New Orleans. Inclusive of the initial shock, the hurricane improved survival eight years past the storm by 1.74 percentage points. Migration to lower-mortality regions explains most of this survival increase. Migrants to low-versus high-mortality regions look similar at baseline, but migrants’ subsequent mortality is 0.83–0.90 percentage points lower for each percentage-point reduction in local mortality, quantifying causal effects of place on mortality among this population. By contrast, migrants’ mortality is unrelated to local Medicare spending.

Location:
B51 Warren Hall
September 14, 2018
12:00 p.m.