Income, wealth and environmental inequality in the United States

Colmer, Jonathan, Qin, Suvy, Voorheis, John and Walker, Reed (2024) Income, wealth and environmental inequality in the United States. CEP Discussion Papers (CEPDP2051). London School of Economics and Political Science. Centre for Economic Performance, London, UK.

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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 ex-amine 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.

Item Type:	Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL:	https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion...
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Centre for Economic Performance
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
JEL classification:	H - Public Economics > H0 - General H - Public Economics > H4 - Publicly Provided Goods Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q5 - Environmental Economics R - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics > R0 - General
Date Deposited:	13 Feb 2025 16:12
Last Modified:	13 Feb 2025 16:12
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126791

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