Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Water and Energy Conservation written by Steven F. Wallander and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nuclear Reactors in the US written by Skylar Olsen and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The preferences and behavior of economic agents is often highly nuanced and heterogenous, having large impacts on the costs and benefits of different methods employed to acheive environmental goals, such as the production of green energy and the efficient allocation of water to residential use. The first chapter of this dissertation studies local housing and labor market effects around US nuclear power plants from 1970 to 2000 through three major events: initial construction of the power plant, the Chernobyl accident, and plant closings. Heavily effected by preference-based sorting and mirgration, nuclear power plant placement lowers unemployment, and increases the education and skill level within the local labor pool. However, nuclear power plants also pose negative externalities: conditional upon labor market improvements, housing values around 10 miles of the nuclear plants decrease with plant placement and increase with plant closures. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine serves as an information shock to US residents. Intercontinental spillover effects result in lower US home ownership rates around US plants and reductions in housing values in the plume exposure pathway. The final chapter examines the impact of non-pecuniary incentives stemming from the behavioral economics literature on water demand. In a randomized field experiment social comparisons are found to significantly decrease water demand with substantial heterogeneity both across and within utilities. Higher users are more responsive to the program and there are important interactions between social norms and existing utility conservation programs. Water resources and energy supply face stress due to population growth, rising incomes, and climate change and these stressors will only increase in the future. This dissertation addresses key issues: influencing the demand for water and the side effects of commercial nuclear power supply and aims to increase knowledge and aid the public policy of both water management and the supply of green energy.
Download or read book Entropy Water and Resources written by Horst Niemes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-05-30 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book lies at the intersection of natural sciences, economics, and water en- neering and is in line with the long tradition of environmental economics at the University of Heidelberg. In the 1970s, the Neo-Austrian Capital Theory was developed using the fundamental laws of thermodynamics as a common language between the natural and social sciences. Niemes (1981) integrated the dynamic and irreversibility characteristics of the natural environment into the Neo-Austrian c- ital theory. Faber et al. (1983, 1987, 1995) then extended this interdisciplinary approach further to create a comprehensive, dynamic, environmental resource model. Over the last 3 decades, the theoretical foundations of environmental economics have been modi ed and there have been an impressive variety of applications. This book aims to reduce the gaps between economic theory, natural sciences, and engineering practice. One of the reasons these gaps exist is because economic assumptions are used to construct dynamic environmental and resource models, which are not consistent with the fundamental laws of the natural sciences. Another reason for the gap might be the distance between academic theory and real world situations. Based on an extended thermodynamic approach, the authors explain which economic assumptions are acceptable for constructing a dynamic model that is consistent with the natural sciences. In particular, the special role of water in the production and reproduction activities will be considered as an integral component.
Download or read book Essays on Environmental and Energy Economics written by Zeyu Wang and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the household-level demand model for water and electricity, with the three chapters focusing on different aspects of the demand model. The first chapter, co-authored with my advisor, Frank Wolak, formulates and estimates a household-level, billing-cycle water demand model under increasing block prices that accounts for the impact of monthly weather variation, the amount of vegetation on the household's property, and customer-level heterogeneity in demand due to household demographics. The model utilizes US Census data on the distribution of household demographics in the utility's service territory to recover the impact of these factors on water demand. An index of the amount of vegetation on the household's property is obtained from NASA satellite data. The household-level demand models are used to compute the distribution of utility-level water demand and revenues for any possible price schedule. It can be used to design nonlinear pricing plans that achieve competing revenue or water conservation goals, which is crucial for water utilities to manage increasingly uncertain water availability yet still remain financially viable. Knowledge of how these demands differ across customers based on observable household characteristics can allow the utility to reduce the utility-wide revenue or sales risk it faces for any pricing plan. Knowledge of how the structure of demand varies across customers can be used to design personalized (based on observable household demographic characteristics) increasing block price schedules to further reduce the risk the utility faces on a system-wide basis. For the utilities considered, knowledge of the customer-level demographics that predict demand differences across households reduces the uncertainty in the utility's system-wide revenues from 22 to 84 percent. Further reductions in the uncertainty in the utility's system-wide revenues, in the range of 10 to 79 percent, are possible by re-designing the utility's nonlinear price schedules to minimize the revenue risk it faces given the distribution of household-level demand in its service territory. The second chapter, co-authored with Frank again, estimates a model of the household-level demand for electricity services such as lighting, heating and cooling, home appliances, and business use in the Indian state of Rajasthan using a combination of household-level survey data and administrative data. This model incorporates customer-level demographic characteristics, billing cycle-level weather variables, and the fact that households are subject to electricity outages and face increasing block price schedules for their electricity consumption. We estimate two versions of the model that differ in how the relationship between electricity use and consumption of each electricity service is modeled. The first model uses a shape-constrained kernel regression and the second model uses a customer-level constant elasticity of electricity consumption with respect to energy service model. Both energy service demand models produce estimates of the response of each of the above four categories of energy services to changes in the price of each energy service. Both versions of the model also produce estimates of the marginal willingness to pay for an additional hour of each of the four categories of energy services. The mean marginal willingness to pay across customers for an additional hour an energy service is the smallest for lighting and the largest for home appliance services. The third chapter studies whether consumers respond to increasing block tariffs. Although increasing block tariffs have been widely adopted by water and electricity utilities, some previous literature claims that consumers only respond to the average price, rather than the increasing block tariffs or the marginal price. In this chapter, we examine the empirical strategies proposed by previous literature, and test whether they are sufficient to conclude if consumers respond to the increasing block tariffs or other perceived prices. We utilize the household-level demand model in the first chapter that responds to the entire price schedule, including all price tiers and quantity cutoffs. We construct a dataset with consumption data simulated using this model. Applying empirical strategies proposed by previous literature to the simulated dataset fails to identify the underlying demand model, and still concludes that consumers respond to the average price. This suggests that current empirical evidences are not sufficient to exclude that consumers respond to the increasing block tariffs. Further investigations are needed to understand the water/electricity consumption decision.
Download or read book Essays on Environmental and Resource Economics written by Dilek Uz and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I present three essays that empirically study water and energy economics issues in California. The objective of the first chapter is to investigate whether and to what extent farmers' crop choice decision is affected by the irrigation water salinity. Using a highly granular land use data and random coefficients logit method, the effect of irrigation water salinity on crop choice is studied in the context of Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta-- California's major water source and home to prime agricultural farmlands. The results show that though the effect of salinity was statistically significant during the past decade, highest and most significant coefficients were those of crop class indicators and weather. This finding suggests that it is essential to reach out to the farmer community to ensure that they are fully capable of coping with expected salinity increases in medium to long run. Additionally, there is evidence for heterogeneity in farmers' response to salinity even though the area studied is relatively small. Ignoring the heterogeneity can result in misleading coefficient estimates especially for those researchers who wish to study farmer behavior in larger regions. Finally, revenue losses are simulated under baseline salinity and potential future salinity scenarios due to building a water conveying facility around the Delta, which suggests an expected revenue loss of about 19%. In the second chapter, together with Steven Buck, I question the wisdom of selecting a forecast model based on a within-sample goodness-of-fit criterion in the context of commercial and industrial (C&I) water demand in the Southern California. Initially, a set of about 350 thousand regression models are estimated using retailer level panel data featuring water consumption, price, employment, weather variables, and GDP. Out-of-sample forecasting performances of those models that rank within the top 1 \% based on various in and out-of-sample goodness-of-fit criteria were compared. We found that the models that provide the best in-sample fit are not necessarily the most favorable ones when it comes to forecasting water demand. The results indicate that on average, these models have a significantly higher absolute forecast error and a larger gap between the highest and lowest forecasts that they generate compared to the models that rank high based on out-of-sample fit criteria we defined. Finally, the third chpater investigates the effect of the 2000 California energy crisis on the take up of an engineering audit program funded by the Department of Energy, aiming operational improvements in various domains, including energy efficiency, at small and medium sized firms. Using a detailed data set containing information on both firm characteristics and the specifics of the recommendations made, a linear probability model is estimated using difference-in-difference strategy. In order to keep the treatment and the control groups as comparable as possible to ensure credible identification, the firms that applied to be audited and made the take up decision before the crisis are compared to those that applied right before the crisis and had to decide after the crisis started. The results show that the 2000 California energy crisis was associated with a 16% increase in the take up of the IAC energy efficiency recommendations. The coefficient estimate is statistically significant and robust to different model specifications.
Download or read book Essays on California s Water Economy written by Hilary Beth Soldati and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that provide insights into the economics of water across different dimensions of the resource and its role in the state of California. The first essay examines the social welfare impacts of variation in irrigation supplies that are available through major public projects. Discussion of the value and significance of the irrigation services that are made available through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta often focus on the immediate impacts to agricultural production and direct farm jobs. This essay, however, considers the reach of these impacts by evaluating how agriculturally based communities are effected by shortages in irrigation supplies. The second and third essays shift attention toward urban water usage. Methods of forecasting urban water demand are reconsidered and a suggestion is made for an alternative approach to evaluating the predictive power of demand models in the second essay. Finally, the third essay measures the effect of consumption analytics and social norm messaging on household decision-making around water usage. Taken together, these three essays address some of the key features of California's water economy. While there exists much research that measures the impact of precipitation shocks on agricultural regions, whether in production or in other outcomes, less research is available that specifically focuses on the impacts of variation in developed irrigation supplies. Given that developing irrigation infrastructure is oft regarded as an adaptation strategy for climate change, it is worth understanding how shocks in the supply of managed water effect individual and regional outcomes. The first essay exploits exogenous variation in the availability of California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta irrigation water to estimate the impact on crime rates for the agricultural counties that use this input. This research provides suggestive evidence in support of the hypothesis that reductions in the availability of this irrigation supply lead to a socially and economically significant increase in both property and violent crime rates. Empirical results support the argument that farm jobs is the mostly likely mechanism, with suggestive evidence that demographic changes are also important. Urban water managers rely heavily on forecasts of water consumption to determine management decisions and investment choices. Typical forecasts rely on simple models whose criteria for selection has little to do with their performance in predicting out-of-sample consumption levels. This essay demonstrate this issue by comparing forecast models selected on the basis of their ability to perform well in-sample versus out-of-sample. Results highlight the benefits of developing out-of-sample evaluation criteria to ascertain model performance. Using annual data on single-family residential water consumption in Southern California, this research illustrates how prediction ability varies according to model evaluation method. Using a training dataset, this analysis finds that models ranking highly on in-sample performance significantly over-estimated consumption $(10\%-25\%)$ five years out from the end of the training dataset relative to observed demands five years out from the end of the training dataset. Whereas, the top models selected using the out-of-sample criteria came within 1\% of the actual total consumption. Notably, projections of future demand for the in-sample models indicate increasing aggregate water consumption over a 25-year period, which contrasts the downward trend predicted by the out-of-sample models. The third essay estimates how household-level water consumption may be impacted by the distribution of Home Water Use Reports (HWURs) by Dropcountr (DC), a digital and web-based consumption analytics platform. Similar to Opower in the energy sector, DC offers social comparison, consumption analytics, and conservation information to residential accounts, primarily through digital communications. Having initiated relationships with several California utilities, as well as major Texas and Colorado providers, the effect of these programs may be measured and will contribute to three areas of academic literature: 1) the study of social norms and moral suasion on consumption behavior, in general; 2) the effects of such methods in the water sector, in specific; and 3) understanding alternatives to price mechanisms in demand-side management of water resources. This research discusses the potential of this type of information to generate measurable effects of interest, both to researchers and to water managers alike. Particular focus will be given to results with a mid-sized California utility and a major Texas provider. Early results indicate an economically and statistically significant $5-8\%$ and $3-4\%$ reduction in average monthly household water consumption for the California and the Texas utility, respectively, for the typical household under treatment of the DC program.
Download or read book Essays on Economics of Water Resources Management written by Chan Chang and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays in Resource Economics written by Jake Christopher Wagner and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manuscript 1 is titled, "Household demand for water in rural Kenya", and is coauthored with Joseph Cook and Peter Kimuyu. In this manuscript we use a household survey from 387 households in rural Kenya to model source choice and water demand using a discrete-continuous (linked) demand model. We find that households are sensitive to the price, proximity, taste, and availability in choosing among sources, but are not sensitive to other source qualities including color, health risk, and risk of conflict. We use the linked demand framework to estimate own-price elasticities in the rural setting. These range between -0.13 and -1.33, with a mean of -0.56, consistent with other estimates from small and large cities.Manuscript 2 is titled, "Energy efficiency information asymmetries in the rental housing market", and is a solo work. In this manuscript I exploit the variation in payment-status (who pays the energy bill), to estimate the effect of information asymmetries on the adoption of efficient (Energy Star rated) technologies in the U.S. rental housing market. Results show that, contrary to previous findings, landlords who pay their tenant's energy bill are no more likely to install energy efficient technologies, suggesting that information asymmetries play a nominal role in the adoption of efficient technologies in the rental housing market.Manuscript 3 is titled, "A linked-demand model to characterize multiple discrete-continuous demand", and is coauthored with Joseph Cook. In this manuscript we develop a reduced form multiple discrete-continuous demand model. Using this model we analyze weekly household demand for water in rural Ethiopia, and characterize four important aspects of demand: (1) total household water demand, (2) source-specific household demand, (3) aggregate water demand at each source, and (4) household preferences across source attributes. Results show that households value water quality, proximity and price in choosing which sources to collect from. Average own-price elasticity estimates from the aggregate demand analysis are found to be -0.18, and are consistent with other own-price elasticity estimates from middle- and low-income countries.
Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Water written by Nicholas William Hagerty and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies three questions in the economics of water resource management. Chapter 1 estimates the economic gains available from greater use of large-scale water markets in California. I develop a revealed-preference empirical approach that exploits observed choices in the existing water market, and I apply it to comprehensive new data on California’s water economy. This approach overcomes the challenge posed by transaction costs, which insert an unobservable wedge between observed prices and marginal valuations. First, I directly estimate transaction costs and use them to recover equilibrium marginal valuations. Then, I use supply shocks to estimate price elasticities of demand, which govern how marginal valuations vary with quantity. I find even a relatively modest market scenario would create additional benefits of $480 million per year, which can be weighed against both the benefits of existing market restrictions and the setup costs of larger-scale markets. Chapter 2 estimates the possible costs of industrial water pollution to agriculture in India, focusing on 63 industrial sites identified by the central government as “severely polluted.” I exploit the spatial discontinuity in pollution concentrations that these sites generate along a river. First, I show that these sites do in fact coincide with a large, discontinuous rise in pollutant concentrations in the nearest river. Then, I find some evidence that agricultural revenues may be substantially lower in districts immediately downstream of polluting sites, relative to districts immediately upstream of the same site in the same year. These results suggest that damages to agriculture could represent a major cost of water pollution. Chapter 3, co-authored with Ariel Zucker, presents an experimental protocol for a project that pays smallholder farmers in India to reduce their consumption of groundwater. This project will test the effectiveness of payments for voluntary conservation – a policy instrument that may be able to sidestep regulatory constraints common in developing countries. It will also measure the price response of demand for groundwater in irrigated agriculture, a key input to many possible reforms. Evidence from a pilot suggests that the program may have reduced groundwater pumping by a large amount, though confidence intervals are wide.
Download or read book Oil and Water Essays on the Economics of Natural Resource Usage written by Samuel Stolper and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the developing world continues its pace of rapid growth and the threat of climate change intensifies, the economics of natural resource usage become increasingly important. From the perspective of both economic efficiency and distributional equity, effective policy design is correspondingly urgent. Market failures such as imperfect competition, externalities, and incomplete information plague resource markets everywhere; and both initial endowments and policy interventions often have regressive incidence. I shed light on some of these issues by studying the economics of natural resource usage in two separate empirical contexts. The first is the market for automotive fuel in Spain; I measure pass-through -- the degree to which retail fuel stations "pass through" diesel taxes to final consumer prices -- and use it assess the distributional impacts of energy policy. The second is the Ganga River Basin of India; I estimate the impacts of environmental regulation on river water quality and infant mortality. In both contexts, I utilize estimates of policy impacts to examine the underlying mechanisms by which affected consumers and suppliers of natural resources make decisions.
Download or read book Essays on Water Economics written by Federico Bruno Pontoni and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Information as a Tool for Urban Water Conservation written by Natalie Danielle Popovich and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1 examines the response to WaterSmart, a program intended to reduce residential water use through the use of social comparisons. In contrast to previous findings on social comparison programs meant to reduce water use, I find that average reductions in the year following treatment are larger than those during the treatment period, although smaller in general. I do not find that this persistent reduction can be explained by an increase in investment in physical capital, via rebates. While home water reports delivered by mail reduce water use by 3.4 times more than those delivered by email, the low marginal cost of email reports make them about three times more cost effective. Targeting high-users with print reports and moderate users with email reports could potentially improve the cost-effectiveness of social comparisons programs for utilities. Chapter 2 evaluates how to introduce non-linear pricing of a natural monopoly in practice. We deploy an event study framework that exploits the transition from flat rate to volumetric pricing in the residential water setting. Using household level panel data on water use, estimate the short-run price elasticity of demand for water in each of the 24 months following the price change. I find that volumetric pricing led to a large and permanent reduction in water use. This reduction also occurred in the two months preceding the price change, in response to personalized information on expected expenditure under the new tariff. These findings suggest that prices coupled with information may be more effective than either price or non-price mechanisms at managing water demand. Chapter 3 introduces a preliminary conceptual framework to incorporate information feedback loops into the water management structure. Drawing on principles of systems thinking and the circular economy, this chapter aims to explain how modeling information stocks explicitly can provide more useful explanations for how and why water users may respond to specific policy mechanisms.
Download or read book Essays on Water Resource Economics written by Daniel A. Brent and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A canonical example in economics of the difference between marginal and total value is the diamond-water paradox. The high price of diamonds is derived from their rarity; whereas the price of water is low due to its abundance, even though it is essential to sustain human life. Scarcity, rather than abundance, better characterizes water availability for many people and this dissertation studies how applied economic principles can be utilized to manage water resources. The first chapter estimate the costs of water volatility in the agricultural sector through a hedonic analysis of heterogeneous water rights. Security for water rights is capitalized into the value of agricultural land, which informs the magnitude and distributional welfare effects of droughts. Tests for an endogenous changepoint fails find a time-varying price premium, indicating that the costs of increased water volatility due to climate change are not manifested in agricultural property markets. The second and third chapters focus on economic and behavioral incentives in urban municipal water demand. Chapter 2 presents a disaggregated model of water demand to separately estimate intensive and extensive margin demand elasticity. Identification is achieved through a novel method merging remotely sensed satellite data on vegetative cover with water metering records. The time series of vegetative cover captures changes in landscape over time and identifies the extensive margin elasticity - a parameter that has only been estimated implicitly through the difference in short run and long run demand. Households that maintain green lawns are less responsive to prices than households either change landscapes or have a mixed landscape. Higher water rates increase the probability of converting to low water-intensive landscapes, which in turn is a major driver of long-run demand. The extensive margin with respect to changing landscapes comprises 7%-48% of total elasticity for households with significant outdoor water use. The final chapter examines the impact of non-pecuniary incentives stemming from the behavioral economics literature on water demand. In a randomized field experiment social comparisons are found to significantly decrease water demand with substantial heterogeneity both across and within utilities. The utility with the highest average treatment effect saved three times as much water in percentage terms as the utility with the lowest average treatment effect. Higher users are more responsive to the program and there are important interactions between social norms and existing utility conservation programs. Water resources face stress due to population growth, rising incomes, and climate change and these stressors will only increase in the future. This dissertation addresses several key issues in agricultural and residential that aim to increase knowledge and aid public policy of managing water resources in times of scarcity.
Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Agricultural and Residential Water Management written by Oliver R. Browne and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ensuring the efficient allocation of water resources among end users has become crucial in light of increasing climate variability and the high capital and environmental costs of developing new supply. However, within the two largest sectors of water consumption -- agricultural users and residential users -- the different nature of water use and governing institutions gives rise to different challenges in allocating water across competing demands. This dissertation comprises two essays, both case studies evaluating policies to improve water management in each sector respectively. Informed by different settings, I use novel data and methods to estimate impacts of the distinct reforms. The two chapters provide lessons about how policymakers in either sector can improve water management in the future.
Download or read book Water Drops written by Peter E. Black and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging book, hydrologist Peter E. Black celebrates the wonder of our planets most precious natural resource. In these brief, nontechnical essays, readers are introduced to waters unique scientific properties, the vital role it plays in Earths ecology and ecosystems, and the impact it has had on human history, culture, art, law, and economics. At turns educational and inspirational, humorous and reverent, the book also sounds a cautionary note: water is abundant, but it is also scarce. Only three percent of the earths water is fresh, and only a small percentage of that fresh water is available for human use and consumption. Therefore, it must be managed carefully, and understood, lest we find ourselves with too little, too late.
Download or read book The Economics of Water Resources written by Agha Ali Akram and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
