Job Market Paper
"Natural Gas Transition, Air Pollution, and Public Health: Evidence from Turkey's Infrastructure Rollout" [Latest version]
Abstract: In the last twenty years, Turkey has experienced a rapid shift from solid fuels to natural gas, driven by the nationwide rollout of distribution infrastructure. This rollout created wide variation across provinces in both the timing of access and the scale of adoption. I study how this transition affected public health. Using province-year data for 81 provinces from 2011-2019, I examine how increases in residential and industrial natural gas consumption affect mortality and morbidity rates. Relative to prior studies documenting mortality gains from natural gas expansion, this paper makes four contributions. First, it relies on actual consumption data to capture the dynamic, dose-response nature of fuel switching. Second, it broadens the scope beyond mortality to include morbidity, highlighting delayed effects and healthcare responses. Third, it distinguishes between residential and industrial natural gas use to identify where the health benefits come from. Fourth, it quantifies the full pathway from cleaner fuel use to pollution reduction to health gains. My main identification strategy is a dynamic difference-in-differences design with continuous treatment (de Chaisemartin and D'Haultfœuille, 2026; de Chaisemartin, D'Haultfœuille, and Vazquez-Bare, 2024), which accommodates staggered rollout and heterogeneous effects. As a complementary approach, I use an instrumental variables strategy that exploits weather-driven variation in heating demand, and a second IV strategy to estimate the health effects of pollution itself. My results indicate substantial health gains. A 10 m³ per-capita increase in residential natural gas consumption leads to a 3.4% drop in circulatory mortality and a 4.7% drop in respiratory mortality, with effects accumulating over about two years. Hospital admissions fall by 3.4%, with no evidence of change in bed-days. Back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the IV estimates imply about 3,500 fewer pollution-related deaths and 4 million fewer healthcare visits nationally in a year for every additional 10 m³ per capita. The health improvements are driven by residential natural gas consumption rather than industrial use, as residential adoption directly replaces highly polluting solid fuels and substantially reduces PM₁₀ and SO₂ levels. Using a modern continuous-treatment DiD with IV validation, this study strengthens the causal link from residential fuel switching to health. The results highlight substantial short- to medium-term public health gains achievable through cleaner transitional energy sources like natural gas in developing countries, offering critical policy insights for similar energy transition strategies elsewhere.
Work in Progress
"Transboundary Impact of Military Conflicts on Air Quality in Neighboring Countries" with Yongjoon Park
Abstract: We investigate the transboundary effects of armed conflicts on air quality and public health in neighboring countries, focusing on the Syrian Civil War and the Ukraine-Russia War. While extensive literature has documented the internal impacts of conflicts, their external environmental consequences have remained understudied, and the few existing studies rely mostly on satellite data. Combining georeferenced daily conflict event data, ground-level air quality monitoring in Turkey and in European countries bordering Ukraine, and meteorological data, this research assesses how military activities in conflict zones affect air pollution levels across national borders. The analysis applies fixed effects methods that account for distance and wind direction, distinguishing impacts on downwind versus non-downwind areas. Additionally, we use ceasefires as exogenous shifts in conflict intensity in an instrumental variables approach to address potential endogeneity. Findings indicate that armed conflicts significantly elevate particulate matter concentrations in neighboring countries, with the effects concentrated in areas downwind from conflict zones. These effects are largest close to the conflict and decline with distance, but remain detectable hundreds of kilometers away. Moreover, conflicts involving chemical weapons or grenades have a more pronounced impact than other types of arms. Using monthly mortality data from Slovakia, we also find that conflict events within 300 kilometers increase respiratory and circulatory deaths, while showing no effect on causes unrelated to air pollution, such as neoplasms and digestive diseases. We have also developed an interactive online visualization mapping conflict intensity in Syria and its wind-direction-adjusted correlation with air quality in regions of Turkey. These insights underscore the necessity of acknowledging cross-border air quality impacts in measuring the costs of conflict and in international policymaking.
"The Impact of Very High Inflation on Healthcare Resource Allocation and Public Health: Evidence from Turkey" with Lucy X. Wang
Abstract: This paper examines how very high inflation affects healthcare systems and public health, using Turkey's recent inflationary crisis as the setting. While extensive research has addressed the health effects of economic recessions and unemployment, the direct implications of sustained inflation remain understudied. Turkey offers a useful setting: annual consumer price inflation reached about 20% during the 2018 currency crisis, rose to 36% in 2021, and peaked above 85% in 2022, yet regional inflation was only weakly tied to unemployment and the period saw no austerity-driven cuts to health spending. We study how inflation affects mortality, healthcare utilization, and the supply of physicians, nurses, and hospital beds, using administrative data for 26 regions from 2009 to 2021. To isolate the effect of inflation, we use a shift-share instrument that combines each region's baseline household expenditure shares with national price changes across consumption categories. Regions that spend more of their budgets on categories whose prices surge, especially food, receive a larger inflation shock. Preliminary results show that higher inflation exposure increases deaths from external causes, a result that holds across a range of robustness checks, while all-cause mortality shows no significant change. During the 2020-2021 surge, healthcare use shifted from hospitals, which charge fees and involve out-of-pocket costs, toward free primary care, and physician supply declined in more exposed regions, followed by nurses a year later. Unemployment does not explain these patterns, pointing to a cost-of-living channel distinct from the business cycle. Ongoing work separates external-cause deaths into suicides, homicides, and accidents, and uses repeated cross-sectional Health Survey data to examine effects on self-rated health. By isolating the effects of inflation from those of recession and austerity, the study provides new evidence on how persistent price instability can strain healthcare systems and compromise public health, even without explicit healthcare budget cuts.