What is the Role of Environmental Stress on Public Health? Asymmetric Evidence on Carbon Emissions, Ecological Footprint, and Load Capacity Factor

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of carbon emission, ecological footprint, which takes into account the demand side of the environment, and load capacity factor, which takes into account both the supply and demand sides of the environment, on health expenditures with conventional and quantile methods. According to the conventional co-integration approach, there is no relationship between the environment and health expenditures. The other side, the findings obtained from the quantile co-integration method, which can give robust results in the presence of tailed distributions and possible endogeneity problems and consider the asymmetric structure in the data set, show the existence of a long-term relationship between the variables. According to the coefficient estimates, while carbon emission and ecological footprint increase health expenditures, the load capacity factor decreases.