Environmental Justice Implications of Power Plant Emissions Control Policies: Heterogeneous Causal Effect Estimation under Bipartite Network Interference

Abstract: Emissions generators, such as coal-fired power plants, are key contributors to air pollution and thus environmental policies to reduce their emissions have been proposed. Furthermore, marginalized groups are exposed to disproportionately high levels of this pollution and have heightened susceptibility to its adverse health impacts. As a result, robust evaluations of the heterogeneous impacts of air pollution regulations are key to justifying and designing maximally protective interventions. However, such evaluations are complicated in that much of air pollution regulatory policy intervenes on large emissions generators while resulting impacts are measured in potentially distant populations. Such a scenario can be described as that of bipartite network interference (BNI). To our knowledge, no literature to date has considered estimation of heterogeneous causal effects with BNI. In this paper, we contribute to the literature in a three-fold manner. First, we propose BNI-specific estimators for subgroup-specific causal effects and design an empirical Monte Carlo simulation approach for BNI to evaluate their performance. Second, we demonstrate how these estimators can be combined with subgroup discovery approaches to identify subgroups benefiting most from air pollution policies without a priori specification. Finally, we apply the proposed methods to estimate the effects of coal-fired power plant emissions control interventions on ischemic heart disease (IHD) among 27,312,190 US Medicare beneficiaries. Though we find no statistically significant effect of the interventions in the full population, we do find significant IHD hospitalization decreases in communities with high poverty and smoking rates.