Policy-makers and others interested in environmental justice (EJ) are concerned that poor and minority communities are disproportionately exposed to pollution. Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments required the dirtiest coal-fired utilities to cap their SO2 emissions at 5.8 million tons...

We examine the determinants of environmental regulatory activity (inspections and enforcement actions) for 1616 U.S. manufacturing plants in four large U.S. cities – Los Angeles, Boston, Columbus, and Houston – using data for 2000-2002. The main focus of our study is to examine whether or...

Many environmental justice studies argue that firms choose to locate waste sites or polluting plants disproportionately in minority or poor communities. However, it is not uncommon for these studies to match site or plant location to contemporaneous socioeconomic characteristics instead of to...

There is substantial evidence that hazardous and solid waste facilities are located disproportionately in communities of color. While there are many potential explanations, one contributing factor might be that policy makers treat waste facilities differently, depending on the racial makeup of...

Economists have long been interested in explaining the spatial distribution of economic activity, focusing on what factors motivate profit-maximizing firms when they choose to open a new plant or expand an existing facility. We begin our paper with a general discussion of the theory of plant...

In the environmental justice literature, evidence of disproportionate siting in poor or minority neighborhoods is decidedly mixed. Some allege this is due to the difference in whether the study looks at evidence at the national, state, or city level. Here, I compare results from two of the...

Strong local opposition to the construction of solid waste landfills has become commonplace and the siting of landfills in the United States is time consuming and expensive. To ease the siting process, host compensation in exchange for permission to construct a landfill has become popular. The...

In this paper we examine the allocation of environmental regulatory effort across U.S. pulp and paper mills, looking at measures of regulatory activity (inspections and enforcement actions) and levels of air and water pollution from those mills. We combine measures of the marginal benefits of...

In this paper, we examine the large and expanding area of Environmental Justice (EJ). The research in this area has developed from examining relatively simple comparisons of current demographic characteristics near environmental nuisances to performing multiple regression analysis and...