A vast empirical literature has convincingly shown that there is pervasive cross-sectional inequality in exposure to environmental hazards. However, less is known about how these inequalities have been evolving over time. I fill this gap by creating a new dataset, which combines satellite data on ground-level concentrations of fine particulate matter with linked administrative and survey data. This linked dataset allows me to measure individual pollution exposure for over 100 million individuals in each year between 2000 and 2014, a period of time has seen substantial improvements in average air quality. This rich dataset can then be used to analyze longitudinal dimensions of environmental inequality by examining the distribution of changes in individual pollution exposure that underlie these aggregate improvements. I confirm previous findings that cross-sectional environmental inequality has been on the decline, but I argue that this may miss longitudinal patterns in exposure that are consistent with environmental gentrification. I find that advantaged individuals at the beginning of the sample experience larger pollution exposure reductions than do initially disadvantaged individuals.
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Air Quality, Human Capital Formation and the Long-term Effects of Environmental Inequality at Birth
May 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-05
A growing body of literature suggests that pollution exposure early in life can have substantial long term effects on an individual's economic well-being as an adult, however the mechanisms for these effects remain unclear. I contribute to this literature by examining the effect of pollution exposure on several intermediate determinants of adult wages using a unique linked dataset for a large sample of individuals from two cohorts: an older cohort born around the 1970, and a younger cohort born around 1990. This dataset links responses to the American Community Survey to SSA administrative data, the universe of IRS Form 1040 tax returns, pollution concentration data from EPA air quality monitors and satellite remote sensing observations. In both OLS and IV specifications, I find that pollution exposure at birth has a large and economically significant effect on college attendance among 19-22 year olds. Using conventional estimates of the college wage premium, these effects imply that a 10 'g/m3 decrease in particulate matter exposure at birth is associated with a $190 per year increase in annual wages. This effect is smaller than the wage effects in the previous literature, which suggests that human capital acquisition associated with cognitive skills cannot fully explain the long term wage effects of pollution exposure. Indeed, I find evidence for an additional channel working through non-cognitive skill -pollution exposure at birth increases high school non-completion and incarceration among 16-24 year olds, and that these effects are concentrated within disadvantaged communities, with larger effects for non-whites and children of poor parents. I also find that pollution exposure during adolescence has statistically significant effects on high school non-completion and incarceration, but no effect on college attendance. These results suggest that the long term effects of pollution exposure on economic well-being may run through multiple channels, of which both non-cognitive skills and cognitive skills may play a role.
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Building the Prototype Census Environmental Impacts Frame
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-20
The natural environment is central to all aspects of life, but efforts to quantify its influence have been hindered by data availability and measurement constraints. To mitigate some of these challenges, we introduce a new prototype of a microdata infras tructure: the Census Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF). The EIF provides detailed individual-level information on demographics, economic characteristics, and address level histories ' linked to spatially and temporally resolved estimates of environmental conditions for each individual ' for almost every resident in the United States over the past two decades. This linked microdata infrastructure provides a unique platform for advancing our understanding about the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, when, how, and why exposures have evolved over time, and the consequences of environmental inequality and changing environmental conditions. We describe the construction of the EIF, explore issues of coverage and data quality, document patterns and trends in individual exposure to two correlated but distinct air pollutants as an application of the EIF, and discuss implications and opportunities for future research.
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Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-57
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.
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The Changing Nature of Pollution, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States
January 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-04
This paper uses administrative tax records linked to Census demographic data and high-resolution measures of fine small particulate (PM2.5) exposure to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap over the past 40 years. In doing so, we focus on the various ways in which income may have contributed to these changes using a statistical decomposition. We decompose the overall change in the Black-White PM2.5 exposure gap into (1) components that stem from rank-preserving compression in the overall pollution distribution and (2) changes that stem from a reordering of Black and White households within the pollution distribution. We find a significant narrowing of the Black-White PM2.5 exposure gap over this time period that is overwhelmingly driven by rank-preserving changes rather than positional changes. However, the relative positions of Black and White households at the upper end of the pollution distribution have meaningfully shifted in the most recent years.
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Racial Disparity in an Era of Increasing Income Inequality
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-01
Using unique linked data, we examine income inequality and mobility across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Our data encompass the universe of tax filers in the U.S. for the period 2000 to 2014, matched with individual-level race and ethnicity information from multiple censuses and American Community Survey data. We document both income inequality and mobility trends over the period. We find significant stratification in terms of average incomes by race and ethnic group and distinct differences in within-group income inequality. The groups with the highest incomes - Whites and Asians - also have the highest levels of within-group inequality and the lowest levels of within-group mobility. The reverse is true for the lowest-income groups: Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics have lower within-group inequality and immobility. On the other hand, our low-income groups are also highly immobile when looking at overall, rather than within-group, mobility. These same groups also have a higher probability of experiencing downward mobility compared with Whites and Asians. We also find that within-group income inequality increased for all groups between 2000 and 2014, and the increase was especially large for Whites. In regression analyses using individual-level panel data, we find persistent differences by race and ethnicity in incomes over time. We also examine young tax filers (ages 25-35) and investigate the long-term effects of local economic and racial residential segregation conditions at the start of their careers. We find persistent long-run effects of racial residential segregation at career entry on the incomes of certain groups. The picture that emerges from our analysis is of a rigid income structure, with mainly Whites and Asians confined to the top and Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics confined to the bottom.
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What Caused Racial Disparities in Particulate Exposure to Fall? New Evidence from the Clean Air Act and Satellite-Based Measures of Air Quality
January 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-02
Racial differences in exposure to ambient air pollution have declined significantly in the United States over the past 20 years. This project links restricted-access Census Bureau microdata to newly available, spatially continuous high resolution measures of ambient particulate pollution (PM2.5) to examine the underlying causes and consequences of differences in black-white pollution exposures. We begin by decomposing differences in pollution exposure into components explained by observable population characteristics (e.g., income) versus those that remain unexplained. We then use quantile regression methods to show that a significant portion of the 'unexplained' convergence in black-white pollution exposure can be attributed to differential impacts of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in non-Hispanic African American and non-Hispanic white communities. Areas with larger black populations saw greater CAA-related declines in PM2.5 exposure. We show that the CAA has been the single largest contributor to racial convergence in PM2.5 pollution exposure in the U.S. since 2000 accounting for over 60 percent of the reduction.
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Re-examining Regional Income Convergence: A Distributional Approach
February 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-05
We re-examine recent trends in regional income convergence, considering the full distribution of income rather than focusing on the mean. Measuring similarity by comparing each percentile of state
distributions to the corresponding percentile of the national distribution, we find that state incomes have become less similar (i.e. they have diverged) within the top 20 percent of the income distribution since 1969. The top percentile alone accounts for more than half of aggregate divergence across states over this period by our measure, and the top five percentiles combine to account for 93 percent. Divergence in top incomes across states appears to be driven largely by changes in top incomes among White people, while top incomes among Black people have experienced relatively little divergence.
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The Privacy-Protected Gridded Environmental Impacts Frame
December 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-74
This paper introduces the Gridded Environmental Impacts Frame (Gridded EIF), a novel privacy-protected dataset derived from the U.S. Census Bureau's confidential Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF) microdata infrastructure. The EIF combines comprehensive administrative records and survey data on the U.S. population with high-resolution geospatial information on environmental hazards. While access to the EIF is restricted due to the confidential nature of the underlying data, the Gridded EIF offers a broader research community the opportunity to glean insights from the data while preserving confidentiality. We describe the data and privacy protection process, and offer guidance on appropriate usage, presenting practical applications.
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The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wages: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data
March 2018
Working Paper Number:
carra-2018-02
States and localities are increasingly experimenting with higher minimum wages in response to rising income inequality and stagnant economic mobility, but commonly used public datasets offer limited opportunities to evaluate the extent to which such changes affect earnings growth. We use administrative earnings data from the Social Security Administration linked to the Current Population Survey to overcome important limitations of public data and estimate effects of the minimum wage on growth incidence curves and income mobility profiles, providing insight into how cross-sectional effects of the minimum wage on earnings persist over time. Under both approaches, we find that raising the minimum wage increases earnings growth at the bottom of the distribution, and those effects persist and indeed grow in magnitude over several years. This finding is robust to a variety of specifications, including alternatives commonly used in the literature on employment effects of the minimum wage. Instrumental variables and subsample analyses indicate that geographic mobility likely contributes to the effects we identify. Extrapolating from our estimates suggests that a minimum wage increase comparable in magnitude to the increase experienced in Seattle between 2013 and 2016 would have blunted some, but not nearly all, of the worst income losses suffered at the bottom of the income distribution during the Great Recession.
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The Census Historical Environmental Impacts Frame
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-66
The Census Bureau's Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF) is a microdata infrastructure that combines individual-level information on residence, demographics, and economic characteristics with environmental amenities and hazards from 1999 through the present day. To better understand the long-run consequences and intergenerational effects of exposure to a changing environment, we expand the EIF by extending it backward to 1940. The Historical Environmental Impacts Frame (HEIF) combines the Census Bureau's historical administrative data, publicly available 1940 address information from the 1940 Decennial Census, and historical environmental data. This paper discusses the creation of the HEIF as well as the unique challenges that arise with using the Census Bureau's historical administrative data.
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