Transcript Regulatory Options & Efficiency

Reminder:
Midterm distributed on Tuesday
No groups– work must be alone.
Environmental Racism
Do governments, firms, and
individuals discriminate against the
poor and racial minorities?
1. Introduction
“Environmental Racism refers to those
institutional rules, regulations, and policies of
government or corporate decisions that
deliberately target certain communities for
least desirable land uses…it is the unequal
protection against toxic and hazardous waste
exposure…” (Bryant, 1995)
Some definitions: LULUs
LULUs: toxic waste sites, bus depots,
solid waste transfer stations, airports,
sewage treatment facilities, recycling
centers, etc.
Early movements:
1967 University of Houston riots over the
death of an African American girl at a
garbage dump that was located in the middle
of a predominantly African American
neighborhood
Early 1980s protests over the landfilling of
PCBs and oil-toxics in Warren County, North
Carolina (mostly African American
population)
More recent action:
The 1987 United Church of Christ Commission
for Racial Justice’s Toxic Wastes and Race in
the United States “shows that communities
of color are disparately impacted by the
nation’s environmental, industrial, and land
use policies”
All of these events point to discrepancies in
the local, state, and federal permitting
process that allow facilities to locate and
pollute (disproportionately,) in minority and
low-income neighborhoods
2. Motivation
The “Chicken vs. Egg” controversy – the
traditional environmental racism model only
looks at a point in time, developing
correlations between pollution levels and
racial composition
This doesn’t answer the question, because
firms may only be locating based on cost…
a) Research question:
Is there discrimination, or are we merely
experiencing an edogeneity problem where
firms (and people) are locating in the least
expensive places?
b) Policy questions:
Have zoning regulations targeted (or allowed
firms to target) minority populations, or those
that lack a “voice” in the political arena?
Previous Literature
Alesina, et al, 1999 QJE article “Public Goods
and Ethnic Divisions”: Results show that the
shares of spending on public goods in U.S.
cities are inversely related to the city's ethnic
fragmentation
Cutler and Glaeser 1997 QJE Article “Are
Ghettos Good or Bad”: They find that African
Americans in more segregated areas have
significantly worse outcomes than African
Americans in less segregated areas.
3. Models (read: how can we improve them)
Dependent Variable: Pollution
Independent Variables: Indices of Segregation, Socioeconomic
variables, etc.
Pollution estimates:
Total releases (volume)
Toxicity-weighted releases (acute, chronic)
Additional characteristics (odor, color)
Indices of Segregation (from Denton and
Massey; Alesina)
Evenness (dissimilarity)
Concentration (people per physical space)
Centralization
Exposure (potential for interaction, or
isolation)
Clustering (spatial proximity)
Socioeconomic Variables:
Income/Capita (by race, by age, by gender)
City Size (log of population)
Educational Attainment
Income Inequality
Poverty Rate
% Foreign Born
Home Ownership and Age of Stock
Transportation (modes, access, and time needed)
Level of Aggregation: City, County, MSA/PMSA
Spatial Improvements
Using U.S. EPA-Office of Solid Waste guidelines,
Meteorological Data, and Digital Terrain Data, ISCAERMOD software computes the risk receptor grid
for multiple pollutants—“Industrial Source Complex
AMS/EPA Regulatory Model”
In short, the various pollution sources are modeled
along with the surface contours, air dispersion. The
model takes into account the dose-response
assessment for the different pollutants, creates an
exposure assessment, the risk characterization from
that exposure.
Theoretical Improvements
Traditional Env. Justice argument vs. Median
Voter argument vs. Principle-Agent
argument…
How can we incorporate political
representation, interest group practices,
campaign contributions, etc. into the model?
How do we model perceived risk vs. actual
risk? Do we need to?
Include non-homogenous (ubiquitous) mobile
source pollution?
4. Conclusions
Multiple dimensions to segregation (spatial) as opposed to
traditional measures which just look at % of total population
Does our model differ from what the median voter model might
predict? Perhaps the spatial distribution of races (and incomes)
is a better predictor or pollution exposure and the provision of
public environmental goods
With the goals of:
a)Determining if environmental racism exists
b)Figuring out how it came about in the first place
c)Attempting to predict where it may occur in the future
d)Creating ways to prevent it from happening again