Diego Kaenzig
Northwestern University
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
12:10-1:30pm
241 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
“Global Temperature and Global Mortality”
Abstract: This paper documents large mortality impacts of climate change. Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1°C of warming increases annual mortality by 2.5 deaths per 1,000 individuals. We show that the large gap between this estimate and analyses based on heat exposure is explained almost entirely by the macroeconomic effects of global temperature fluctuations: using U.S. monetary policy shocks as instruments for global income, we find that income contractions mediate nearly all of the mortality response to global warming. We use this evidence to estimate damage functions in a neoclassical growth model with finite lifespans. Mortality contributes about $600 per ton of CO2 to the Social Cost of Carbon—about one quarter of total climate damages. These results imply that unilateral decarbonization is cost-effective for populous countries and that economic adaptation has a double dividend by also reducing climate-related mortality.