The grassroots movement that placed environmental justice issues on the national stage around 1980 was soon followed up by research documenting the correlation between pollution and race and poverty. This work has established inequitable exposure to nuisances as a stylized fact of social science. In this paper, we review the environmental justice literature, especially where it intersects with work by economists. First we consider the literature documenting evidence of disproportionate exposure. We particularly consider the implications of modeling choices about spatial relationships between polluters and residents, and about conditioning variables. Next, we evaluate the theory and evidence for four possible mechanisms that may lie behind the patterns seen: disproportionate siting on the firm side, “coming to the nuisance” on the household side, market-like coordination of the two, and discriminatory politics and/or enforcement. We argue that further research is needed to understand how much weight to give each mechanism. Finally, we discuss some policy options.

No abstract

No abstract

The environmental justice literature has found that the poor and people of color are disproportionately exposed to pollution. This literature has sparked a broad activist movement and several policy reforms in the United States and internationally. In this article, we review the literature documenting correlations between pollution and demographics and the history of the related movement, focusing on the United States. We then turn to the potential causal mechanisms behind the observed correlations. Given its focus on causal econometric models, we argue that economics has a comparative advantage in evaluating these mechanisms. We consider ( a) profit-maximizing decisions by firms, ( b) Tiebout-like utility-maximizing decisions by households in the presence of income disparities, ( c) Coasean negotiations between both sides, ( d) political economy explanations and governmental failures, and ( e) intergenerational transmission of poverty. Proper identification of the causal mechanisms underlying observed disproportionate exposures is critical to the design of effective policy to remedy them.

No abstract