James T. Hamilton

Testing for environmental racism: Prejudice, profits, political power?

Economic theories offer many explanations for why exposure to environmental risks may vary by race: pure discrimination by polluters or politicians in siting decisions; differences in willingness to pay for environmental amenities linked to income or education levels; and variations in the propensity of communities to engage in collective action to oppose the location of potential polluters. This article tests these hypotheses by focusing on the capacity decisions of commercial hazardous waste facilities. Zip code neighborhoods targeted for capacity expansion in plans for 1987-1992 by commercial hazardous waste facilities had an average non white population of 25 percent, versus 18 percent for those areas without net expansion. Differences in the probability that residents will raise a firms expected location costs by engaging in collective action to oppose capacity siting offer the best explanation for which neighborhoods are selected for capacity expansions.

Politics and Social Costs: Estimating the Impact of Collective Action on Hazardous Waste Facilities

Firms that generate negative externalities may consider the effects of their location on the surrounding environment because of the right of their prospective neighbors to demand compensation for pollution and raise the transaction costs of location. Since communities vary both in the value individuals place on the environment and in the ability of residents to organize politically, locations that generate the least political opposition may not be the locations that result in the lowest externalities. This article tests whether the degree to which firms internalize their externalities depends on the ability of affected communities to engage in collective action. The results indicate that firms processing hazardous waste, when deciding where to expand capacity, do take into account variations in the potential for collective action to raise their costs.

Noncompliance in Environmental Reporting: Are Violators Ignorant, or Evasive, of the Law?

Theory: An increasingly common regulatory tool is one that delegates the duty to provide information to the regulated entities, creating new problems in principalagency models of regulation. Hypotheses: Failure to comply with regulations mandating information provision is as much due to ignorance of reporting requirements as to willful evasion. Methods: A modified detection controlled estimation model for coverage, violation, and detection of facility compliance with the EPAs Toxics Release Inventory, estimated for facilities in Minnesota in 1991. Results: Violation is better understood by those variables associated with the likelihood that the firm is ignorant of TRI reporting requirements, than by those associated with evasion. Firms in violation tend to be small facilities, releasing or transferring small amounts of toxins to the environment.

The Market Value of Reducing Cancer Risk: Hedonic Housing Prices with Changing Information

In this paper, we use housing price changes occurring after the release of a regulatory agencys environmental risk information to estimate the value people place on cancer risk reduction. Using a large original data set on the repeat sales of houses, matched with detailed data on hazardous waste cancer risk and newspaper publicity, we find that housing prices respond in a rational manner to changes in information about risk. Since the new information indicated that the sites in our sample pose relatively low cancer risk, the informational release led residents to lower their risk beliefs, resulting in an average housing price increase of

Computational journalism

56 to

How costly is “clean”? An analysis of the benefits and costs of Superfund site remediations

87. This price change implies a statistical value per case of cancer of

Biased ballots? The impact of ballot structure on North Carolina elections in 1992"

4.3 million to

THE (MANY) MARKETS FOR INTERNATIONAL NEWS

8.3 million, which is similar to the estimates obtained in labor market studies of the value of a statistical life. Newspaper publicity about the local sites increased housing prices, suggesting that residents perceived the news as good.

News That Sells: Media Competition and News Content

How computer scientists can empower journalists, democracys watchdogs, in the production of news in the public interest.

Why Addressing the Poor and Underinsured is Vexing

The cleanup of hazardous waste sites under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys Superfund program is governed by a number of legislative and regulatory constraints. Congress passed legislation in 1986 directing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to pursue permanent remedies that embodied stringent cleanup standards. The agency has chosen to use conservative assumptions in risk assessments at hazardous waste sites, including a presumption that on-site risks for hypothetical future residents should be calculated in the site remediation process. This article offers the first comprehensive assessment of the cost-effectiveness of these Superfund cleanups. Our results reveal that many EPA Superfund remediations fail a partial benefit-cost test. For a sample of the 150 Superfund sites, we find that at the majority of sites the expected number of cancers averted by remediation is less than 0.1 cases per site and that the cost per cancer case averted is over