Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 09/11/2021 de 12:30 à 13:30

Salle R1.09, Campus Jourdan

CHAMPALAUNE Pascale (PSE)

Inequality in Exposure to Air Pollution in France: Evidence from a City-Level Public Policy

I combine measures of neighbourhood characteristics with high-resolution remote-sensing data to provide the first national-scale study of cross-sectional and longitudinal inequality in exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in France. First, descriptive evidence reveals a U-shaped relationship between income and PM2.5 exposure at the national level. However, within urban areas, poorer neighbourhoods are overexposed - a finding confirmed by fixed-effect models In addition, longitudinal inequality measures suggest that, in relative terms, recent air quality improvements accrued predominantly to areas that had a lower initial exposure, and intermediate income. In a second step, I exploit a change in air quality schemes at the level of urban areas in an event-study framework, so as to shed light on potentially unequal benefits from the induced reduction in exposure. I argue that paying specific attention to the issue of spatial autocorrelation is particularly important in a setting where the dependent variable is spatially continuous, and thus control for a spline of census-block geographic coordinates in preferred specifications. Results suggest that the adoption of new air quality schemes accounted for about a third of the drop in exposure over the period. I find that initially higher-income areas experienced larger improvements than lower-income ones, and that suburbs received larger improvements than city centres. This last finding hints at differences in the relative effectiveness of the measures taken to improve air quality.