Collaborative Research: Neighborhood Choice, Environmental Justice, and Policy Analysis

环境正义运动将污染与低收入少数群体之间有记录的相关性解释为环境种族主义的证据。另一种解释是，由于收入限制或对环境质量的不同品味，低收入少数家庭接受糟糕的环境质量，以换取更低的住房成本。因此，观察到的相关性可能反映了白人和少数族裔人群之间的收入或品味差异。这项研究基于不同社区的空气污染、学校质量和种族构成，考察了不同种族、收入和住房保有权的家庭的区位决定。为此，它建立了一个空间均衡框架，该框架明确地模拟了家庭的内生分类、特定类型社区的形成和房价。这项研究将使基于环境质量的移民分类测试成为可能，并通过模拟推断各种针对环境正义问题的公共政策的效果。这项研究将进一步加深我们对种族、收入、住房和公共产品的社会互动的理解。它还将有助于制定公共政策，帮助解决污染与收入或少数族裔人口之间的关联。例如，将改善环境质量的目标对准低收入少数族裔社区，可能会导致高收入家庭的涌入，推高该社区原居民的租金。在这种情况下，具有讽刺意味的是，高收入家庭可能会获得大部分福利--而低收入租户家庭实际上可能会变得更糟。在这种情况下，基础更广的政策实际上可能更有效地帮助贫困人口。我们的研究将有助于评估这些和其他政策问题。最后，通过帮助开发同时研究移民、社区形成和房价的建模框架，它将有助于建立一种能够解决相关主题的研究方法，包括学校教育、交通运输和地方税收的研究。

The environmental justice movement interprets documented correlations between pollution and low-income minority populations as evidence of environmental racism. An alternative explanation is that, because of income constraints or differential tastes for environmental quality, low-income minority households accept poor environmental quality in exchange for lower housing costs. The observed correlations may therefore reflect the income or taste differences between white and minority populations. This study examines the locational decisions of households, of different race, income, and housing tenure, based on the air pollution, school quality, and racial make-up of different communities. To do so, it builds on a spatial equilibrium framework, which explicitly models the endogenous sorting of households, formation of communities of specific types, and housing prices. The study will enable tests of migratory sorting based on environmental quality, and, through simulations, infer the effects of various public policies addressing environmental justice issues.This research will further our understanding of the social interactions of race, income, housing and public goods. It will also help design public policies to help address the correlation between pollution and income or minority populations. For instance, targeting improvements in environmental quality to lower-income minority neighborhoods may result in an influx of higher income households, driving up rents for the neighborhood's original inhabitants. In such cases, higher-income households may ironically receive the bulk of benefits-and low-income renter households may actually be made worse off. In this case, broader-based policies may actually be more effective for helping the poorer populations. Our research will help evaluate these and other policy questions. Finally, by helping develop a modeling framework that simultaneously studies migration, community formation, and housing prices, it will contribute to a research method that can address related topics, including studies of schooling, transportation, and local taxation.