Corbett A. Grainger
ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher
Corbett A. Grainger, University of Wisconsin - Madison, CESifo Guest from 8 to 14 September 2019.
Discrimination in measuring ambient pollution?
Corbett Grainger’s recent work studies how ambient pollution has been measured under the Clean Air Act in the United States. Together with Andrew Schreiber, he has examined the decisions for siting new monitors, focusing on the incentives facing local regulators in these decisions. Using remote sensing data combined with monitoring data, they find that local regulators tend to site monitors in relatively ‘clean’ areas when federal oversight is limited. This finding suggests that non-attainment designation under the Clean Air Act is endogenous, and county-level pollution measurements will be biased as a result. In a companion paper (AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2019), he finds that strategic avoidance is exacerbated in neighborhoods that are poor or have high concentrations of minorities, which has important equity implications.
Mr. Grainger is an environmental and resource economist whose primary focus is on the distributional impacts of policy as well as political economy. He has worked with international organizations such as Environmental Defense Fund, Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.
During his visit at CESifo, Mr. Grainger will be working on a project studying individuals’ labor supply responses to air pollution in China. Using remote sensing pollution data, paired with a restricted-access panel data for families in China, results suggest that individuals reduce their hours worked in response to increases in pollution. In contrast to previous literature, which focuses on productivity impacts of pollution, the project has found that particulate matter concentrations (which, in China, come primarily from combustion) have a large impact on individuals’ labor supply decisions.
Corbett Grainger is an Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He holds a PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA in Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Economics and German from Concordia College at Moorhead, Minnesota.
