Residential Mobility and Ozone Exposure in the San Francisco Bay Area
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Date
2009-09-03
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Abstract
Although a large social science literature has focused on pollution’s influence
on property values, less emphasis has been placed on residential mobility responses
to pollution. However, the literature has not addressed two questions. First, when
homeowners move and buy bigger homes, do they expose themselves to more
ozone pollution? Second, do homeowners try to avoid extended ozone exposure by
reducing the time between moves? If we can address each question using
information about individual moving decisions, we can better understand the
distributional consequences of environmental policy and learn more about the
extent of ozone avoidance behavior. This study uses a new micro data set that
combines Bay Area housing sales, buyer characteristics, and monitor-level ozone
concentrations. Individual buyers can be followed as they move from their old
house to a new house and individual houses can be tracked with the buyer’s race
and income and the house’s year-by-year ozone concentrations. The research
suggests that conditional on moving and buying more housing services, poor
minority homeowners frequently “pay†for the additional housing services by
taking on more ozone exposure. There is also evidence that after people move, they
reduce the time between moves as ozone pollution gets worse relative to other Bay
Area houses. As a result, the scope of ozone averting actions homeowners use to
avoid ozone exposure may extend beyond common day-to-day responses such as
reducing the time spent outdoors.
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Keywords
environmental justice, discrete-time survival analysis, ozone, hedonics, housing markets, Residential Mobility
Citation
Degree
PhD
Discipline
Economics
