Racial Disparities in the Health Effects from Air Pollution: Evidence from Ports

Virtual Seminar
Washington, DC 20460
United States

Contact: Carl Pasurka, 202-566-2275 (PASURKA.CARL@EPA.GOV)

Presenter:   Kenneth Gillingham (School of the Environment, Yale University and NBER)

Description:  Air pollution is well known for causing human health problems. More perniciously, the health effects are often unevenly distributed across the population, with some groups facing higher pollution exposures and worse health outcomes. This paper examines racial inequity in health outcomes due to air pollution around a major point source of air pollution: maritime ports. Port facilities are important to study because they tend to locate in highly populated and low-income areas.

This paper estimates the contemporaneous effects of port activity-related air pollution on physical and mental health, focusing on racial disparities in health outcomes. We first leverage quasi-experimental variation from distant oceanic events several days prior that exogenously shift the vessel tonnage in port to identify the causal impact of vessel tonnage on air pollution. We then estimate the causal effect of daily pollution concentrations on hospitalizations in port areas using quasi-random variation from the vessel tonnage in ports (as predicted by distant oceanic storms several days prior) and local wind conditions. We finally use a regression discontinuity design and a simulation model to analyze a port-related environmental policy that reduces fossil fuel use in ports to show how policy can reduce inequality in health outcomes.

We show that a one percent increase in vessel tonnage in port increases pollution concentrations for major air pollutants by 0.3-0.4% within a 25-mile radius of ports in the United States. We also find that one additional average-tonnage vessel in a port over a year leads to 2.9 hospital visits (related to respiratory, heart, and psychiatric illnesses) per thousand Black residents in California port areas, and only 1.0 hospital visits per thousand whites. Our results also show that a policy in California to reduce fossil fuel use in ports significantly reduces pollutant concentrations, disproportionately benefiting the Black population.

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