Environmental Justice Policy
ESRC AQMEN/GSSG Lecture at the University of Glasgow
White Flight and Residential Sorting: Can Residential Mobility Explain Environmental Injustice?
Using A Structural Model of Neighbourhood Dynamics to Simulate the Impact of Environmental Disamenities on Location Decisions
Date: Tues 10th Dec 2013, 4.30pm
Venue: YUDOWITZ Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor of the WOLFSON MEDICAL SCHOOL BUILDING (Room:253), University of Glasgow
Effective environmental justice policy requires an understanding of the economic and social forces that determine the correlation between race, income, and pollution exposure. We show how the traditional approach used in many environmental justice analyses cannot identify nuisance-driven residential mobility. We develop an alternative strategy that overcomes this problem and implement it using data on air toxics from Los Angeles County. Differences in estimated willingness-to-pay for cleaner air across race groups support the residential mobility explanation. Our results suggest that household mobility responses eventually work against policies designed to address inequitable siting decisions for facilities with environmental health risks.
Chris Timmins is based in the Department of Economics, Duke University, USA. He is a leading international expert in urban and environmental economics and has published in leading international journals such as the American Economic Review and Econometrica. Formerly of Yale University, his research has focussed on developing cutting empirical methods for the valuation of local public goods and amenities, with a particular focus on hedonic techniques and models of residential sorting. His recent research has helped advance the methods used to measure the costs associated with exposure to poor air quality, the benefits associated with remediating brownfields and toxic waste under the Superfund program, the costs of exposure to shale gas development, and the valuation of non-marginal changes in disamenities, such as the large reductions in violent crime that occurred in many US cities during the 1990?s. He is also a research associate in the Environmental and Energy Economics group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an editorial board member of the American Economic Review, co-editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and co-editor of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
Registration: Attendance is free but you need to register via www.aqmen.ac.uk. Any queries regarding registration should be addressed to [email protected]
Event organised by the Glasgow Social Statistics Group and the ESRC Applied Quantitative Methods Network Research Centre
