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

该奖项是NSF社会、行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界，工业或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF的奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。NSF致力于促进来自科学界各部门的科学家，包括来自代表性不足的群体的科学家参与其研究计划和活动;博士后期间被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的重要水平。每个博士后研究员必须解决推进各自学科领域的重要科学问题。这个博士后奖学金提供了一个新兴的生物科学家的机会，探索消费者的决定和社会不平等的作用，创造和延续环境不平等和相关的公共卫生缺陷，在这个项目中表示为生态健康不公正。学者和政策制定者长期以来一直在研究环境条件与公共卫生结果之间的联系。特别令人感兴趣的是，一个共同的观察，即社区与少数民族和/或低收入家庭的比例高，往往面临更高水平的暴露于环境危害，如污染物，而同时有较低的获得环境商品，如当地的新鲜食品来源。这些因素造成这些社区内不成比例的不良健康结果。然而，尽管对这些不平等的存在达成了共识，但其原因仍然是一个争论点，使政策讨论复杂化。许多研究人员认为，生态健康不公正反映了家庭有意识地决定牺牲环境质量以换取更便宜的房价或其他设施，而其他人则认为这反映了社会不平等，如居住隔离，这阻止了受影响的家庭获得必要的环境商品。该项目题为"发展生态健康正义的定量模型：威斯康星州麦迪逊和密尔沃基的案例研究利用经济建模的最新进展，利用住宅市场参与关于生态健康不公正原因的辩论，特别关注空气质量和当地食品获取。该研究开发并估计了一个比较住宅分类模型，其允许估计消费者对给定住房市场内的住宅的结构和邻近特征的偏好。这些偏好可以根据家庭的社会经济状况（即本申请中的种族和收入）而有所不同，并且可以表示为简单的美元金额。住宅分类模型还包括反事实政策分析，以确定住房市场变化对家庭的美元影响。比较不同种族和经济地位的家庭愿意在生态健康设施和其他住房功能之间做出的权衡，为消费者决策在现有生态健康不平等中的作用提供了重要证据。反事实分析为决策者提供了一个宝贵的工具，可以确定和比较不同干预措施对解决这些不平等问题的影响，这些不平等问题再次以简单的美元数额表示。在麦迪逊和密尔沃基之间建立一个比较模型，可以作为两个大城市中心之间的一个有用的对比，这两个大城市中心彼此非常接近，但在地理和人口组成上却有很大的不同。这将允许考虑这些因素如何与家庭一级的人口统计和偏好，在表征现有的不平等，通知未来的调查生态健康不公正在不同的人口和地理环境。

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.