Climate Change: The Global Impact of Rising Temperatures on Mortality Rates

The economics of climate change has gained increasing interest in the last few decades as the effects of drastic temperature shifts have risen. The relationship between extreme temperatures and mortality rates has been analyzed for the United States by Deschenes and Greenstone (2011). In this paper, I contribute to this literature with a cross-country analysis of the temperature-mortality relationship. I examine the impact of rising average temperatures on mortality rates in 14 different countries around the world, focusing primarily on infant mortality. In addition to the effect of average temperatures, I analyze the effects of extreme temperature days on mortality rates using different measures: the number of days with temperatures over 80 degrees; the number with days of temperatures under 20 degrees; and the number of days with temperatures between 20 and 80 degrees. I also control for a number of factors in this study such as labor-force participation, population, GDP per capita, country, and year fixed effects.