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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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Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-27R
This paper describes a framework to estimate the marginal cost of air pollution regulation, then applies it to assess whether a large set of existing U.S. air pollution regulations have marginal benefits exceeding their marginal costs. The approach utilizes an important yet under-explored provision of the Clean Air Act requiring new or expanding plants to pay incumbents in the same or neighboring counties to reduce their pollution emissions. These "offset" regulations create several hundred decentralized, local markets for pollution that differ by pollutant and location. Economic theory and empirical tests suggest these market prices reveal information about the marginal cost of abatement for new or expanding firms. We compare estimates of the marginal benefit of abatement from leading air quality models to offset prices. We find that, for most regions and pollutants, the marginal benefits of pollution abatement exceed mean offset prices more than ten-fold. In at least one market, however, estimated marginal benefits are below offset prices.
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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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Long-Run Adult Socio-economic Outcomes
from In Utero Airborne Lead Exposure
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-53
As a neurotoxin, early exposure to lead has long been assumed to affect socioeconomic out-comes well into adulthood. However, the empirical literature documenting such effects has been limited. This study documents the long-term effects of in utero exposure to air lead on adult socio-economic outcomes, including earnings, disabilities, employment, public assistance, and education, using US survey and administrative data. Specifically, we match individuals in the 2000 US Decennial Census and 2001-2014 American Community Surveys to average lead concentrations in the individual's birth county during his/her 9 months in utero. We find a 0.5 'g/m3 decrease in air lead, representing the average 1975-85 change resulting from the passage of the U.S. Clean Air Act, is associated with an increase in earnings of 3.5%, or a present value, at birth, of $21,400 in lifetime earnings. Decomposing this effect, we find greater exposure to lead in utero is associated with an increase in disabilities in adulthood, an increase in receiving public assistance, and a decrease in employment. Looking at effects by sex, long-term effects for girls seem to fall on participation in the formal labor market, whereas for boys it appears to fall more on hours worked. This is the first study to document such long-term effects from lead using US data. We estimate the present value in 2020, from all earnings impacts from 1975 forward, to be $4,230 Billion using a discount rate of 3%. In 2020 alone, the benefits are $252 B, or about 1.2% of GDP. Thus, our estimates imply the Clean Air Act's lead phase out is still returning a national dividend of over 1% every year.
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The Grandkids Aren't Alright: The Intergenerational Effects of Prenatal Pollution Exposure
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-36
Evidence shows that environmental quality shapes human capital at birth with long-run effects on health and welfare. Do these effects, in turn, affect the economic opportunities of future generations? Using newly linked survey and administrative data, providing more than 150 million parent/child links, we show that regulation-induced improvements in air quality that an individual experienced in the womb increase the likelihood that their children, the second generation, attend college 40-50 years later. Intergenerational transmission appears to arise from greater parental resources and investments, rather than heritable, biological channels. Our findings suggest that within-generation estimates of marginal damages substantially underestimate the total welfare effects of improving environmental quality and point to the empirical relevance of environmental quality as a contributor to economic opportunity in the United States.
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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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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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Longitudinal Environmental Inequality and Environmental Gentrification: Who Gains From Cleaner Air?
May 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-04
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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Consequences of the Clean Water Act and the Demand for Water Quality
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-07
Since the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, government and industry have invested over $1 trillion to abate water pollution, or $100 per person-year. Over half of U.S. stream and river miles, however, still violate pollution standards. We use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water pollution and its determinants, including 50 million pollution readings from 170,000 monitoring sites, to study water pollution's trends, causes, and welfare consequences. We have three main findings. First, water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially since 1972, though were declining at faster rates before then. Second, the Clean Water Act's grants to municipal wastewater treatment plants caused some of these declines. Third, the grants' estimated effects on housing values are generally smaller than the grants' costs.
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OFFSHORING POLLUTION WHILE OFFSHORING PRODUCTION*
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-09R
We examine the role of firm strategy in the global combat against pollution. We find that U.S. plants release less toxic emissions when their parent firm imports more from low-wage countries (LWCs). Consistent with the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, goods imported by U.S. firms from LWCs are in more pollution-intensive industries; U.S. plants shift production to less pollution-intensive industries, produce less waste, and spend less on pollution abatement when their parent imports more from LWCs. The negative impact of LWC imports on emissions is stronger for U.S. plants located in counties with greater institutional pressure for environmental performance, but weaker for more-capable U.S. plants and firms. These results highlight the role of local institutions and firm capability in explaining firms' choice of offshoring and environmental strategy.
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