Ash, Michael
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Professor, Department of Economics
Last Name
Ash
First Name
Michael
Discipline
Economics
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Environmental justice & policy
Health disparities
Healthcare workers
Labor
Health disparities
Healthcare workers
Labor
Introduction
Professor Ash is also affiliated with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), where he collaborates on the Corporate Toxics Information Project and uses EPA data to track the exposure of communities to pollution hazards (findings from which recently appeared in his co-authored Justice in the Air). A grant from the National Institutes of Health supported his research on the relationship between hospital labor unions, wages, and patient safety. Other recent publications include his co-authored article in Feminist Economics, “Whose Money, Whose Time? A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Time Spent on Housework the United States.” Professor Ash was a 2007 Fulbright Fellow in Budapest, Hungary, and served previously as a staff labor economist for the Council of Economic Advisors.
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Publication Open Access Public Debt and Growth: An Assessment of Key Findings on Causality and Thresholds(2017) Ash, Michael; Basu, Deepankar; Dube, ArindrajitWe provide a comprehensive assessment of the relationship between public debt and GDP growth in the postwar advanced economies. We use the timing of changes in public debt and growth to account for endogeneity, and find little evidence of a negative relationship. Semi-parametric estimates do not indicate any threshold effects. Finally, we reconcile our results with four recent, influential papers that found a substantial negative relationship, especially when public debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP. These earlier results appear to derive mostly from peculiar parametric specifications of nonlinearities, or use of small samples which amplify the influence of outliers.Publication Open Access Environmental Justice and Carbon Pricing: Can They Be Reconciled?(2023-01-01) Boyce, James K; ASH, MICHAEL; Ranalli, BrentCarbon pricing has been criticized by environmental justice advocates on the grounds that it fails to reduce emissions significantly, fails to reduce the disproportionate impacts of hazardous co-pollutants on people of color and low-income communities, hits low-income households harder than wealthier households, and commodifies nature. Designing carbon pricing policy to address these concerns can yield outcomes that are both more effective and more equitable.Publication Open Access Enabling an Equitable Energy Transition Through Inclusive Research(2023-01-01) Ash, Michael; Baker, Erin; Tuominen, Mark; Venkataraman, Dhandapani; Burke, Matthew; Castellanos, S.; Cha, M.; Chan, Gabe; Djokic, D.; Ford, J.C.; Goldstein, Anna P.; Hsu, David; Lacker, Matt; Miller, C.; Nock, D.; Ravikumar, A.P.; Bates, Allison; Stefanopoulou, Anna; Grubert, E; Kammen, D.M; Pastor, M.; Attari, S.Z,; Carley, S.; Clark, D.L; Dean-Ryan, D.; Kosar, U.; Bowie, Kerry; Johnson, TinaComprehensive and meaningful inclusion of marginalized communities within the research enterprise will be critical to ensuring an equitable, technology-informed, clean energy transition. We provide five key action items for government agencies and philanthropic institutions to operationalize the commitment to an equitable energy transition.Publication Open Access Did Alcohol Policy Really Cause the Postsocialist Mortality Crisis? Revisiting the Rebound and Affordability Hypotheses(2021-04) Azarova, Aytalina; Scheiring, Gabor; Ash, Michael; King, LawrenceThis article reexamines the argument that alcohol policies were the major factor behind the mortality crisis in postsocialist Russia. We show that the correlation between the Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign (rebound hypothesis), alcohol prices in the 1990s (affordability hypothesis), and mortality reported in previous analyses is not robust to splitting oblasts into Far- East and the rest of Russia. Our analysis conducted on a sample of 534 towns in the European part of Russia also finds no robust evidence supporting the two hypotheses. In contrast, findings linking privatization to mortality are robust to controlling for the anti-alcohol campaign and the affordability of alcohol.Publication Open Access Genetic Diversity and Economic Development: Assessing the Key Findings in Ashraf and Galor (2013)(2018) Caraher, Raymond; Ash, MichaelWe replicate Ashraf and Galor (2013) and find that its conclusions concerning the association between human genetic diversity and economic development depend substantially on coding errors and sample selection. We correct the coding errors and add or update data on genetic diversity and population density from high-quality sources. We find little support for the hypothesis that variation in genetic diversity among subpopulations has a systematic relationship with economic development.Publication Open Access Measuring Corporate Environmental Justice Performance(2008) Ash, Michael; Boyce, James K.Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial facilities disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people. Applying the measure to 100 major corporate air polluters in the United States, we find wide variation in the extent of disproportional exposures. In a number of cases, minorities bear more than half of the total human health impacts from the firm's industrial air pollution.Publication Metadata only Is Environmental Justice Good for White Folks?(2010) Ash, Michael; Boyce, James K.; Chang, Grace; Scharber, HelenThis paper examines spatial variations in exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in urban areas of the United States, using geographic microdata from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk‐Screening Environmental Indicators project. We find that average exposure in an urban area is positively correlated with the extent of racial and ethnic disparity in the distribution of the exposure burden. This correlation could arise from causal linkages in either or both directions: the ability to displace pollution onto minorities may lower the effective cost of pollution for industrial firms; and higher average pollution burdens may induce whites to invest more political capital in efforts to influence firms’ siting decisions. Furthermore, we find that in urban areas with higher minority pollution‐exposure discrepancies, average exposures tend to be higher for all population subgroups, including whites. In other words, improvements in environmental justice in the United States could benefit not only minorities but also whites.Publication Open Access Assessing the jobs-environment relationship with matched data from US EEOC and US EPA(2016) Ash, Michael; Boyce, James K.Using matched facility-level data from the US EPA Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EEO-1 database, we assess (1) the trade-off between jobs and environmental quality and (2) the extent to which the distribution of the benefits of employment in industrial production mirrors the distribution of the costs of exposure to hazardous byproducts of industrial activity in the dimension of race and ethnicity. We find no evidence that facilities that create higher pollution risk for surrounding communities provide more jobs in aggregate. The share of pollution risk accruing to ethnic or racial minority groups typically exceeds the share of employment and substantially exceeds the share of good jobs held by members of those groups.