Comment on "Re-Examining the Contribution of Public Health Efforts to the Decline in Urban Mortality"

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (with David Cutler).

We address points raised by Anderson, Charles, and Rees (2022), which comments on our prior work. After correcting unambiguous data mistakes, our revised estimates suggest that municipal water disinfection (filtration) explains 38 percent of the total mortality rate decline in our sample cities and years—a result not very different from our original estimate of 43 percent. However, effects on infant mortality rates are smaller than in our original analysis. Much of the difference between their analyses and ours is due to the coding of partial intervention years and to differences in population denominators, for which ideal data are difficult to find.