Household Income and Pollution

Abstract

Country-level analyses of global Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) relationships that use multicountry panel data sets are likely to suffer from several types of aggregation bias that may explain why previous studies have yielded conflicting results. The authors analyze 1990 cross-sectional data for the United States for three pollutants and test the general EKC relationship as well as the pure income effect. Their results suggest that the income level at which households reduce their exposure to pollution depends on the nature of the pollutant. They find consistent evidence for such a relationship for coarse particulate matter but little evidence for nonmonotonic relationships for carbon monoxide and ground-level ozone.