1 Introduction On March 29th, 2023, a federal judge approved a $54 million settlement in a class action lawsuit against the shoemaker Wolverine in Kent County, Michigan. The settlement covers over 1,700 residences in the county where the company had previously disposed contaminated waste from their tannery in Rockford which ultimately contaminated the soil, groundwater, and surface water in the surrounding areas. Rockford, a small city in Northern Kent County, had a local economy largely held up by the company since the Great Depression. In the 1970s, Wolverine would begin to use PFAS chemicals for waterproofing their boots. Also known as forever chemicals, they are chemicals which cannot be broken down naturally and cause significant health defects to those exposed to them. Much like the infamous (and better known) case of DuPont’s production of Teflon, improper disposal of production waste led to the chemicals leaking into…show more content… Methodology 2.1 Matching Procedure To construct the control group, I follow the procedure of (Christensen et al., 2023) and use a nearest neighbor matching algorithm to identify 5 cities and townships to use for comparison to Rockford. These places are chosen based on a set of demographic and economic characteristics that capture both the current state of Rockford and its development over time. I restrict the choice set to those places which have between half and twice the population of Rockford (2,500 to 11,000 residents, respectively). Then, the cities closest matches are determined by the following criterion: the places population, percent of vacant houses, median household income, unemployment rate, and the change in household income and population since 1970. The 5 closest matches will be used in the estimation. In order of match distance, they are: Lawrence Township, Ohio; Madison Township, North Carolina; Jefferson Township, Pennsylvania; LaGrange Township, Ohio; and Prairie Township, Indiana. The covariate balance is shown in Table
