Tiebout Sorting and Toxic Releases

Combining detailed county-to-county migration data with Toxics Release Inventory data, and fine-scale PM 2.5 concentration levels, we investigate the relationship between internal migration, income of migrant and non-migrant households and county-level differences in environmental quality. We show that households moving to “cleaner” counties are relatively “richer”—a result consistent with a sorting by income in the spirit of Tiebout (1956). An implication of this finding is that internal migration could contribute to the persistence of disparities in pollution exposure at the county-level.