Hi #EconSky, I'm very excited to present our new working paper (nber.org/papers/w33050) at Brown today! A mid-sized 🧵 TL;DR: "Racial differences in income unable to explain a meaningful share of gaps in ambient air pollution exposure." - ThreadSky

jmcolmer.bsky.social • 133 days ago

Hi #EconSky, I'm very excited to present our new working paper (http://nber.org/papers/w33050) at
Brown today! A mid-sized 🧵 TL;DR: "Racial differences in income unable to explain a meaningful share of gaps in ambient air pollution exposure."

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jmcolmer.bsky.social•133 days ago

While there are many reasons environmental inequality might exist, economists have often raised the idea that environmental inequality may be rooted in various forms of economic inequality. We ask if this narrative holds water.

jmcolmer.bsky.social•133 days ago

Answering this question has been hard. Measurement of air quality has been patchy, individual income data (by race) not typically available at the same spatial resolution as pollution varies, and most of the time we just end up with correlations rather than causal insights.

jmcolmer.bsky.social•133 days ago

We make progress using the universe of tax returns, high-res,remote sensing measurements of ambient air pollution, and linked individual-level demographics and residential address histories, which means we have individual, race-specific income at the same resolution as pollution

jmcolmer.bsky.social•133 days ago

We show that at every percentile of the national income distribution, Black, Hispanic, and Asian individuals are exposed to higher levels of ambient air pollution that White individuals. We show this pattern was true in 1984 and holds over time. This is how it looked in 2016.

jmcolmer.bsky.social•133 days ago

Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if we were to close the Black-White income gap (a 60% increase in income!) that the Black-White pollution gap would shrink by ~10%. That's not very responsive.

jmcolmer.bsky.social•133 days ago

This pattern also holds within cities, and for other pollutants. The pollution-income gradients are slightly steeper, but still very inelastic. In 2016 a 1% increase in income for Black individuals is associated with a -0.0167% reduction in ambient air pollution.

drtaragoddard.com•132 days ago

This may be an absurdly basic question, but does the study account for housing prices? For example, places where there is a larger discrepancy between wages and housing prices, so even having decent income doesn't get you housing away from freeways until you come from generational housing wealth?

jmcolmer.bsky.social•132 days ago

We do analysis looking at variation in exposure throughout the wealth distribution as well as the income distribution and find very similar results. One way of thinking about the findings is that income/wealth isn't isn't sufficient to explain differences in exposure.

drtaragoddard.com•132 days ago

Thanks! Do you have speculation about what is? (I haven't read the full paper yet, just your thread, sorry!) Is the exposure inequity both at local (eg nhbhd) and metro scales, or more one or the other? Does the pollution exposure differ by mobile or point source?

tkovach.bsky.social•132 days ago

For that level of granularity you may want to look at the supplementary data from Tessum et al
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf4491#supplementary-materials

jmcolmer.bsky.social•132 days ago

This is the data we're using https://drive.google.com/file/d/14b8HKmq5_0uWMLGzJEsXitvcel_1PkVD/view?usp=drivesdk

jmcolmer.bsky.social•132 days ago

We're looking into highways in our analysis of mobility to see where people move. The benefit of what we're doing over the earlier work is that we data on individuals, where they live and their income. We're not relying on data on the characteristics of places, e.g., median income of a tract etc.

drtaragoddard.com•132 days ago

I was partly asking these questions about scale of analysis and pollution source because I was trying to reconcile your findings with the recent work out of the Urban Institute on housing and freeways.

https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/highway-pollution-near-multifamily-homes-hurts-residents-zoning-and-transportation

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