Socio-Economic Composition and Uniform Partial Ranking of US County-Level Environmental Quality

Esfandiar Maasoumi and Daniel Millimet

No 510, Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The distribution of pollution is of just as much concern as the level of pollution, particularly if the areas located in the upper tail of the distribution are not randomly assigned. The literature on ‘environmental discrimination’ typically finds that even conditional on various locational attributes, areas concentrated with minorities experience higher mean pollution levels. However, claims of environmental discrimination based upon only the first moment of a conditional (or unconditional) distribution may be narrow and disregard the remainder of the distribution and more informative welfare evaluations. This shortcoming is addressed by adapting recent developments in the stochastic dominance literature to test for unambiguous rankings between various distributions of toxic releases. Using county-level data from the EPA from 1990 – 1999, we find ...

Keywords: Pollution; Stochastic Dominance; Nonparametric Tests; Environmental Discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2001-09
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:smu:ecowpa:0510

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