IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32356.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Private Adoption of Public Good Technologies: The Case of PurpleAir

Author

Listed:
  • Joshua S. Graff Zivin
  • Benjamin Krebs
  • Matthew J. Neidell

Abstract

We study the private adoption and diffusion of a technology that provides a local public good – PurpleAir (PA) pollution monitors. From a purely informational perspective, the ideal spacing of these monitors should reflect the degree of spatial correlation in pollution. In stark contrast, we find that monitor adoption is spatially highly clustered in less polluted areas, suggesting the marginal monitor adopted provides minimal additional public information. Moreover, monitor adoption mainly occurs in affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods, underscoring the potential environmental justice concerns associated with the private provision of this public good.

Suggested Citation

  • Joshua S. Graff Zivin & Benjamin Krebs & Matthew J. Neidell, 2024. "Private Adoption of Public Good Technologies: The Case of PurpleAir," NBER Working Papers 32356, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32356
    Note: EEE PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32356.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling
    • Q55 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32356. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.