Population Health Effects and Health-Related Costs of Extreme Temperatures: Comprehensive Evidence from Germany

This study assesses the short and medium-term impact of extreme temperatures on population health and health-related costs in Germany. For 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of 170 million hospital admissions and all 8 million deaths with weather and pollution data at the day-county level. Extreme heat significantly and immediately increases hospitalizations and deaths. This finding holds irrespective of whether we employ econometric models that are standard in the economics literature or models that are standard in epidemiology; we contrast and discuss both approaches. We find strong evidence for “harvesting” and that the instantaneous heat-health relationship predominately exists in the short-term. Aggregating and estimating the models at the monthly or yearly level decreases the effect sizes by the factor 100. The health-related economic costs accumulate up to e 5 million per 10 million population per hot day with maximum temperatures above 30 ̊C (86 ̊F).