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Research

Research

Research

Summary

This research provides the first consistent economic basis for defining environmentally vulnerable populations in two dimensions: physiological sensitivity to environmental pollutants and limited economic capacity to engage in behaviors that avert or mitigate the effects of those pollutants.A framework has been demonstrated which extends the concept of weak substitution and combines it with separability restrictions to permit a systematic treatment of the economic and physiological factors influencing susceptibility to environmental health risks. Separability allows the decomposition of a household's expenditures into separate components that reveal income and substitution effects. Weak substitution provides the structure needed to describe the role of goods that are mitigating substitutes for pollutants. Our framework is general and offers a menu of separability restrictions that, when combined with weak substitution, achieve the same generic results but accommodate a wide range of problems. Our model encompasses separability attributed to household composition and decision scales (e.g. the collective model of the household, as well as joint modeling of physical effects (e.g. mortality and morbidity).

Funding

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Timeline

August 2008 — September 2011