The Census Environmental Impacts Frame

Research in environmental economics often relies on aggregated place-based data, limiting our understanding of the interplay between economic activity and environmental conditions. To mitigate this, we introduce the Census Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF), a new microdata infrastructure linking individual-level socioeconomic data and residential histories with high-resolution estimates of environmental conditions for nearly all US residents over the past 2 decades. The EIF enables researchers to analyze the distribution of environmental conditions using individual-level rather than place-based data, track exposures over time, and assess their economic consequences in unprecedented detail. This article describes the EIF and summarizes opportunities for researchers.