Data and Code for "The Changing Nature of Pollution, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States"

This paper uses administrative tax records linked to Census demographic data and high-resolution measures of fine small particulate (PM2.5) exposure to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap over the past 40 years. In doing so, we focus on the various ways in which income may have contributed to these changes us-ing a statistical decomposition. We decompose the overall change in the Black-WhitePM2.5 exposure gap into (1) components that stem from rank-preserving compression in the overall pollution distribution and (2) changes that stem from a reordering of Black and White households within the pollution distribution. We find a significant narrowing of the Black-White PM2.5 exposure gap over this time period that is overwhelmingly driven by rank-preserving changes rather than positional changes.However, the relative positions of Black and White households at the upper end of the pollution distribution have meaningfully shifted in the most recent years.