Developing a Quantitative Model of Ecohealth Justice: a Case Study of Madison and Milwaukee, WI

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This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. This postdoctoral fellowship provides an emerging scholar-scientist an opportunity to explore the role of consumer decisions and social inequality in creating and perpetuating environmental inequalities and connected public health deficiencies, denoted in this project as ecohealth injustice. Scholars and policymakers have long investigated the connection between environmental conditions and public health outcomes. Of particular interest is the common observation that neighborhoods with a high proportion of minority and/or low-income households often face higher levels of exposure to environmental hazards, such as pollutants, while simultaneously having lower access to environmental goods, such as local sources of fresh food. These factors contribute to disproportionately adverse health outcomes within these communities. However, despite the consensus on the existence of these inequalities, the cause remains a point of debate complicating policy discussions. Many researchers have argued that ecohealth injustice reflects conscious decisions by households to sacrifice environmental quality for cheaper home prices or other amenities, while others have suggested that it reflects social inequalities, such as residential segregation, which prevent affected households from accessing necessary environmental goods. This project, entitled Developing a Quantitative Model of Ecohealth Justice: a Case Study of Madison and Milwaukee, WI, uses recent advances in economic modeling to use residential markets to enter this debate on the causes of ecohealth injustice, focusing in particular on air quality and local food access.The study develops and estimates a comparative residential sorting model, which allows for the estimation of consumer preferences for structural and neighborhood characteristics of homes within a given housing market. These preferences are allowed to vary across households based on their socioeconomic profile, namely race and income in this application, and can be represented as simple dollar amounts. The residential sorting model also accommodates counterfactual policy analysis, to determine the dollar impact of changes in a housing market on households. Comparing the tradeoffs households of different racial and economic statuses are willing to make between ecohealth amenities and other housing features provides vital evidence as to the role of consumer decision making in existing ecohealth inequality. Counterfactual analysis gives policy makers a valuable tool in determining and comparing the impact of different interventions to address these inequalities, which are again represented as a straightforward dollar amount. Developing a comparative model between Madison and Milwaukee serves as a useful contrast between two large urban centers within close proximity of one another, which nonetheless differ significantly in their geographical and demographic composition. This will allow for a consideration of how these factors interact with household-level demographics and preferences in characterizing existing inequalities, informing future investigations into ecohealth injustice in different demographic and geographic contexts.