Health Sciences and Health Policy, University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland.
Health Econ. 2013 Sep;22(9):1037-51. doi: 10.1002/hec.2948. Epub 2013 Jul 8.
We explore two unexpected changes in flight regulations to estimate the causal effect of aircraft noise on health. Detailed measures of noise are linked with longitudinal data on individual health outcomes based on the exact address information. Controlling for individual heterogeneity and spatial sorting into different neighborhoods, we find that aircraft noise significantly increases sleeping problems and headaches. Models that do not control for such heterogeneity and sorting substantially underestimate the negative health effects, which suggests that individuals self-select into residence based on their unobserved sensitivity to noise. Our study demonstrates that the combination of quasi-experimental variation and panel data is very powerful for identifying causal effects in epidemiological field studies.
我们探讨了飞行规定中的两个意外变化，以估计飞机噪音对健康的因果影响。详细的噪音测量与基于确切地址信息的个体健康结果的纵向数据相关联。在控制个体异质性和空间到不同社区的分类后，我们发现飞机噪音显著增加了睡眠问题和头痛。不控制这种异质性和分类的模型会大大低估负面健康影响，这表明个体基于其对噪音的不可观察敏感性进行自我选择居住。我们的研究表明，准实验变化和面板数据的结合在识别流行病学实地研究中的因果效应方面非常有效。
