East-Side Story: Historical Pollution and Persistent Neighborhood Sorting

By Stephan Heblich, A. Trew, Yanos Zylberberg. Journal of Political Economy, 2016

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Why are the east sides of formerly industrial cities more deprived? To answer this question, we use individual-level census data and create historical pollution patterns derived from the locations of 5,000 industrial chimneys and an atmospheric model. We show that this observation results from path-dependent neighborhood sorting that began during the Industrial Revolution, as prevailing winds blew pollution eastward. Past pollution explains up to 20% of observed neighborhood segregation in 2011, even though coal pollution stopped in the 1970s. We develop a quantitative model to identify the role of neighborhood effects and relocation rigidities underlying this persistence.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6199e9ffe0ede694724848b04380145fbe8b639c

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Attila Ambrus
2. Erica M. Field
3. Jan K. Brueckner
4. Somik V. Lall

Citations in the corpus

• Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-Run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Landscape (2020, background): “In particular in the context of Heblich, Trew, and Zylberberg (2016), there is more scope for different amenities (local institutions, local infrastructure, etc.) evolving in affected versus nonaffected LSOAs during the long period of air pollution.”