Resumen de Bolstering environmental (in)justice claims with a quasi-experimental research design
Richard Funderburg, Lucie Laurian
Claims of environmental injustice are often confounded by the potential for reverse causality. An undesirable land use may concentrate minorities and poor people locally as the established population moves out and others remain or move in. This paper addresses the issue of causality for the case of waste incinerators in France with a before and after, matched control design. Site selection, population migration, and the capacity and emissions of incinerators have mutually reinforcing effects that can exacerbate environmental injustice. We develop a predictive model of incinerator siting in France and use it to identify a viable twin location for every incinerator site, similar in most aspects, except the twins were not selected to host a facility. In turn, these matches enable us to construct explicit counterfactuals and measure the true impact of incinerators on demographic change. We find solid evidence that concentration of immigrants influences incinerator location and weak evidence for the converse, that incinerator location influences concentration of immigrant populations. We also find that concentration of immigrants greatly affects the operations of incinerators, with greater capacity and greater emissions at incinerators located near the highest concentrations of immigrant populations.
