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Title: Mobility Constraints and the Distributional Consequences of Particulate Matter

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2004

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Abstract: Wage-hedonic techniques are regularly used to determinewillingness-to-pay to avoid environmental disamenities, like thoseassociated with particulate matter and other forms of air pollution. A keyassumption underlying these techniques is that individuals face anunconstrained choice over alternative locations. Evidence suggests thatthis is not the case and that, moreover, certain groups facedisproportionate constraints on mobility. This has the potential to skewhedonic measurements toward finding smaller costs of pollution,especially for the immobile (typically disadvantaged) groups. We proposea model of residential sorting that recovers estimates of mobility costs anduses them to correct this source of bias. The model is applied to data fromthe micro samples of the 1990 and 2000 US Censuses, and the results areused to measure the welfare cost of a marginal increase in PM10. Resultsshow a significant downward bias in WTP calculated with the wagehedonictechnique, particularly for those with less education.

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Authors: Timmins, Christopher

Publisher: Yale University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

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