Replication files and repository for the paper "Decomposing Trends in U.S. Air Pollution Disparities from Electricity" by Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Kyle C. Meng, and Paige Weber. Full manuscript can be found in https://www.nber.org/papers/w30198.
The dataset census_tract_year_pm25_from_electricity.dta contains census tract level data for 2000-2018 with the following variables:
gisjoin: census tract ID.
year: calendar year.
totalpm25: PM2.5 concentrations from all electricity generating units in our sample.
median_income: median real income at the census tract level from the ACS.
minority_pct: percent of non-White population at the census tract level from the ACS.
black_pct: percent of Black population at the census tract level from the ACS.
hispanic_pct: percent of Hispanic population at the census tract level from the ACS.
total_pop: 2000-2018 average total population at the census tract level from the ACS.
fuel: "all" which denotes that the emissions come from all the facilities, regardless of the fuel used.
The do file HCMW_figure4_replication.do uses the census_tract_year_pm25_from_electricity.dta dataset to replicate Figure 4 of the manuscript.
Update in 02/08/2024: we added a new file called "totalpm25_by_fuel" which contains the PM2.5 concentrations at the census tract divided by type fuel for 2018. Note that the data for all census tracts in the 2018 census tract geographies, which is not be the final census tracts for the main analysis in our paper (and available in the repo file census_tract_year_pm25_from_electricity.dta) since for the main analysis we used consistent geographies, thus there might be additional census tracts than in the census_tract_year_pm25_from_electricity file.