Do Trends in Pollution Disparities imply Narrowing Health Disparities? Evidence from California (with Kyle Meng)
Danae’s research combines satellite data, pollution transport models, and causal inference methods to learn about environmental inequality. Danae’s previous work has taught us that environmental policies can reduce inequalities in pollution exposure. Her talk will go a step further to see whether these changes translate to differences in health outcomes across communities.
—Vincent Thivierge, PhD Student, Bren School
Watch a recording of this talk here
ABSTRACT
Pollution concentrations in the United States have fallen in recent decades. Despite these improvements, relative pollution concentrations between minority communities and other communities persist. This paper analyzes recent trends in pollution concentration disparities across racial groups in California and compares these with disparities in health outcomes often attributed to pollution. We combine administrative data on the universe of emergency room admissions across California with satellite and monitoring information on pollution concentrations to document three new facts. First, despite decreases in relative pollution concentrations, health disparities have largely remained constant. Black individuals persistently are admitted to emergency rooms for asthma at twice the rate of white individuals. These health disparities are particularly higher for younger populations: Black children aged 0-10 experience an almost three-fold difference in asthma incidence compared to white children. Second, these health disparities remain even after controlling for observed demographic characteristics and for patient zip code of residence and year fixed effects. Black patients experience a larger incidence of asthma and other upper tract respiratory diseases both in urban and rural zip codes, and across different income levels. Finally, our paper analyzes whether air quality regulation decreases health disparities. We analyze whether the revisions to the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone (2008) decrease disparities in asthma incidence among minority populations. We find that these air quality policies reduced asthma emergency department visits but had no effect in reducing health disparities suggesting that additional policies to reduce health disparities might be needed.
BIO
Danae Hernandez-Cortes is an Assistant Professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Danae's research tries to understand what are the causes of environmental inequities and which policies can help alleviate these inequities. Danae also studies the distributional consequences of environmental policies and environmental justice. Her work uses applied causal inference methods with remote sensing techniques and atmospheric transport models to analyze the environmental justice consequences of environmental policy. She got her PhD in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and her BA in Economics at CIDE in Mexico City.