Mortality, temperature, and public health provision : a comment on Cohen and Dechezlepretre (2022)

Cohen and Dechezleprêtre (2022) investigate the heterogeneous impact of temperature on mortality across Mexico, and how affordable healthcare services that target the low-income population attenuate the mortality effects of weather events. They find that while extreme temperatures are more dangerous than less extreme temperatures, the increased frequency of non-extreme temperatures mean these temperatures cause more deaths. First, we reproduce the paper's main findings, uncovering a minor coding error that has a trivial effect on the main results. Second, we test the robustness of the results to clustering at the state level, omitting precipitation, and using a different weighting scheme. The original results are robust to all of these changes.