Will Cleaning Up the Local Environment Narrow or Widen Inequality?
If cleaning up a local environment also raises prices, does that widen or narrow inequality? We combine an equilibrium sorting model characterizing location choices with a new approach to causally estimate the impact of a cleaner environment on location utility to answer this question. We estimate the model leveraging a plausibly exogenous change in the local environment due to shale gas propensity, together with spatially-granular bilateral migration, air quality, and emissions data. Our results characterize relative welfare changes by racial groups under the observed environmental quality improvements, as well as simulated changes under counterfactual environmental policies. The results aim to quantify the connection between equity-oriented place-based environmental policies and residential location choices.
Date: 13 May 2024, 16:05 (Monday, 4th week, Trinity 2024)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Online via Zoom. Streaming in Seminar Room C or https://zoom.us/j/97534799321?pwd=V2pOWGQ2N3l3WWg3eXFSK25hc0laQT09
Speaker: Danae Hernandez-Cortes (Arizona State University)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Part of: Environment and Resource Economics Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Edward Clark