CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

October 2024

Working Paper Number:

CES-24-57

Abstract

This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, wealth, and race by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979'2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic information from linked survey and administrative data. In the first year of our data, the relationship between income and ambient pollution levels nationally is approximately zero for both non-Hispanic White and Black individuals. However, at every single percentile of the national income distribution, Black individuals are exposed to, on average, higher levels of pollution than White individuals. By 2016, the relationship between income and air pollution had steepened, primarily for Black individuals, driven by changes in where rich and poor Black individuals live. We utilize quasi-random shocks to income to examine the causal effect of changes in income and wealth on pollution exposure over a five year horizon, finding that these income'pollution elasticities map closely to the values implied by our descriptive patterns. We calculate that Black-White differences in income can explain ~10 percent of the observed gap in air pollution levels in 2016.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

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:
minority, ethnicity, ethnic, emission, pollution, environmental, pollutant, wealth, tax, racial, race, estimates pollution, disparity, taxpayer

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Internal Revenue Service, National Science Foundation, Ordinary Least Squares, Toxics Release Inventory, University of Chicago, Environmental Protection Agency, Decennial Census, General Accounting Office, Department of Education, National Ambient Air Quality Standards, American Community Survey, Protected Identification Key, National Center for Health Statistics, Earned Income Tax Credit, W-2, Core Based Statistical Area, Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board, Disclosure Review Board, Adjusted Gross Income, Data Management System

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