October 13: Danae Hernández-Cortés, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University
"Do Environmental Markets Cause Environmental Injustice? Evidence from California's Carbon Market"
View a recording of this talk.
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Market-based environmental policies are widely adopted on the basis of allocative efficiency. However, there is growing concern that market-induced spatial reallocation of pollution could widen existing pollution concentration gaps between disadvantaged and other communities. We estimate how this "environmental justice gap" changed following the 2013 introduction of California's carbon market, the world's second largest and the one most subjected to environmental justice critiques. Embedding a pollution dispersal model within a program evaluation framework, we find that while EJ gaps across criteria air pollutants were widening prior to 2013, they have since fallen as a consequence of the carbon market.
About the Dr. Hernández-Cortés
Danae Hernández-Cortés is an Assistant Professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in June 2021. Dr, Hernández-Cortés' research analyzes some of the sources of environmental inequality and the distributional consequences of environmental policy. She has done research on climate policy, energy transitions, air pollution, and climate change in Mexico and the United States and her research has received national press coverage from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
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