Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Pollution Control written by Jiameng Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water pollution poses important challenges worldwide. In developed countries, most of the challenges from water pollution have to do with recreational and amenity use of water, as well as the negative impact on ecosystems. For instance, in the United States, dead zones caused by nutrient pollution occur annually in many major coastal waters, including Tampa Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, and coastal North Carolina, causing large welfare effects in these regions. In developed countries like the United States, the aging drinking water infrastructure, such as the presence of lead pipes, is also a threat to human health. In developing countries, water pollution has a pronounced impact on human health given that safe drinking water is limited in many areas. Economic analysis plays a critical role in the making of environmental policy. In designing and assessing a water pollution control policy, it is important to understand the costs and benefits of such policies and be able to empirically evaluate their effectiveness. However, there are still important challenges in understanding the costs and benefits of water pollution control policies. Water quality improvement is a non-market good, so no direct price signal is available for valuing it. To overcome this problem, economists have developed several non-market valuation techniques, such as hedonic property models and recreation demand models. Each valuation method only captures a piece of the price consumers are willing to pay to improve water quality. This dissertation comprises three papers that answer some critical questions on the economic analysis of water pollution policies. In the first paper, I estimate the marginal willingness-to-pay of homeowners for water quality improvement in Florida,using a two-stage model that combines the recreational value and amenity value of both local and regional water quality improvement. This paper, which focuses on nutrient pollution problems related to the dead zones discussed earlier, generates a more comprehensive estimate of the benefits of water pollution reduction than that used in prior work. In the second paper, I estimate an important cost of water pollution by investigating the short-run and long-run educational impacts of lead pollution in drinking water. Using data from Texas, I find that drinking water lead exposure at birth has a significant negative impact on both 3rd-grade standardized test scores and the high school graduation rate. While many prior papers in environmental economics quantify short-run and long-run human capital costs of air pollution, this paper is one of only a few to do so for an important water pollution problem. Switching to the third paper, I examine the existing literature on the policy instruments that can be used to reduce water pollution. With a focus on developing countries, I describe the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of various water pollution control policies, identify the challenges for implementing and assessing such policies, and provide recommendations for future research

Download or read book Managing Environmental Quality written by Linda Maria Fernandez and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Quality in the United States written by David Andrew Keiser and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Quality and Availability written by Saman Olfati and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Water and Climate Economics written by Nicholas Anthony Potter and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes three chapters on the economics of climate, water resources, agricultural production, and conflict. Chapter one is an introduction. In chapter two I provide an analysis of the impact of exposure to temperature on returns to irrigated and nonirrigated cropland. Chapter three is a theoretical approach to understand the economic implications of the forfeiture of water rights for nonuse. Chapter four looks at the relationship between drought, conflict, and governance using a disaggregated spatial analysis.Chapter two is on temperature effects on snowpack-dependent surfacewater irrigated production systems in the western US. Irrigated production in that region is characterized by a diverse mix of high value crops, so producers may have more of an ability to adapt to hotter temperatures. I focus on county rental prices for irrigated and nonirrigated cropland and find that economic returns to cropland begin to decrease starting at about 25℗ʻC for irrigated acres and 20℗ʻC for nonirrigated acres.Chapter three covers the economic history that led to the creation of forfeiture policies for the nonuse of surface water rights in the western US. I develop a theory of water rights under prior appropriations with forfeiture and use it to examine why forfeiture policies were adopted in all western states that allocate water via prior appropriation. Forfeiture reduced risk to junior water rights holders and limited speculative water claims, but did so at the cost of increased transaction costs when trading water rights. While these were small when remaining water resources were available to be claimed, they are significantly more costly when all water in a basin has been allocated.In chapter four I combine a spatiotemporal grid of drought and geolocated conflict with several measures of governance characteristics to examine how governance mediates the relationship between drought and conflict. I find little evidence of a relationship between drought and conflict in Africa and Latin and South America. In countries that are more democratic or in which doing business is easier, an increase in drought reduces the likelihood of riot incidence. Other governance measures have no discernible effect.

Download or read book Three Essays on Environmental Economics written by Zihan Zhuo and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation studies three seemly independent topics on environmental economics, but they share the same theme: the reactions of local governments and firms on promotional incentives and environmental regulations in China.The first chapter examines whether China's Two Control Zone policy has successfully shifted the relative share of SO2 emissions from control zones to non-control zone areas. With a difference-in-differences framework, I find that although the policy failed to achieve its total emission control targets, it caused a partial shifting of SO2 emissions and industrial output from control zones to non-control zone areas and promoted economic growth in relatively less industrialized, less populated, and less developed counties at a cost of higher environmental health damage within those areas. Estimations from this paper suggest that the policy caused the firms in control zone areas to produce 23% less SO2 emission than those in non-control zone areas. My findings highlight the importance of the spillover effect from regional total emission control programs.The second chapter studies a campaign-style innovative environmental enforcement strategy, the Central Environmental Protection Inspection (CEPI), which has assumed an important role in China's environmental enforcement since 2016. With the help of daily water pollution records from 2015 to 2018, this chapter documents the policy's short-term and long-term impacts. Utilizing a difference-in-differences style strategy and comparing water pollution readings from stations belonging to different batches of the policy, evidence is found indicating that local polluters tend to decrease emissions as a precaution prior to inspection periods. Meanwhile, the campaign achieves consistent pollution progress in terms of increasing dissolved oxygen and reducing ammonia nitrogen and total organic carbon emissions. The rebound effects are not strong enough to override water quality improvements. The results indicate that campaign-style enforcement, though possible to be manipulated by local polluters and governments in the short-run, remains a potentially efficient tool for policymakers to pursue long-term environmental enforcement goals.In the third chapter, I examines the existence and scale of interjurisdictional spillovers in China. I apply the difference-in-differences strategy to a unique dataset of more than 100 thousand firms' SO2 and COD emission records from 1998 through 2005. With the help of historical weather information, I identify the windward and leeward status for counties near provincial borders and find that firms located in windward counties relatively increase their SO2 emissions when local windspeed is higher. Heterogeneous analysis further finds that transboundary pollution is especially pronounced for private firms and across borders with yearly average wind speed around median level. The results suggest that a certain level of recentralization in environmental governance can be efficient for reducing transboundary pollution from windward counties in China.

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 The Economics of Water Quality written by Naomi Zeitouni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a number of prominent economic studies all of which deal with key water quality issues. The studies focus on the economic aspects of water quality including identifying the polluters' actions and incentives, designing and comparing control mechanisms, analyzing the costs and benefits of water quality programmes, and finally managing transboundary water quality. They all make recommendations for improving water quality through changing incentives, programmes and/or policies.

Download or read book The Economics of Clean Water written by United States. Federal Water Pollution Control Administration and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Rights written by Karin Audrey Donhowe and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, in the third chapter I explore differences in Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) water management across its projects. BOR delivers water to farmers in Western states based on long-term contracts with irrigation districts that specify how much land can be irrigated, the quantity of water allotted per acre, and terms of payment. There is variation across Reclamation projects in terms of rights ownership, water allocation, and the ability to transfer water. These areas of institutional variation affect the security of farmers' claims to water, and security of rights in turn affects investment decisions, crop choice, and the value of water rights. This paper documents water management across five of the largest BOR irrigation projects and evaluates the implications of the variation.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Pollution Prevention written by Yongchen Zou and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book ECONOMICS OF CLEAN WATER V 1 DETAILED ANALYSIS V 2 ANIMAL WASTES PROFILE V 3 INORGANIC CHEMICALS INDUSTRY PROFILE AND SUMMARY REPORT written by UNITED STATES. FEDERAL WATER POLLUTION CONTROL ADMINISTRATION. and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Economics of Water Pollution written by Maddipati Narasimha Murty and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the theoretical and applied approaches used to control pollution in developing countries and is the first of its kind in the Indian context. It examines the feasibility of using economic instruments for combating water pollution. The empirical findings of the book can serve as an invaluable guide for environmental policy-makers.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Innovation as Adaptation to Climate Change written by Hongxiu Li and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters on technological innovation as adaptation to climate change. The first chapter adopts a non-cooperative game theory model to investigate the relationship between adaptation technology and the formation of emission-reducing International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) on climate change. The main contribution to the literature consists of considering countries that are heterogeneous with respect to the benefits and costs of both mitigation of emissions and adaptation. While differences in climate vulnerability are a deterrent for cooperation, this chapter shows that increasing the effectiveness of adaptation in highly vulnerable countries can foster an IEA. Both free-riding on climate change mitigation efforts, and free-riding on adaptation technology among members of an IEA can be reduced by the transfer of adaptation technology within the IEA. A numerical example with parameters estimated from climate change data is employed to simulate stable coalitions and demonstrate how the transfer of adaptation technology reduces free-riding on an IEA. The second chapter examines the determinants of adaptive innovation aimed at reducing the impact of natural disasters, which are expected to intensify with climate change. Starting from a conceptual model combining perceived risk theory with innovators' profit motive, this study investigates the salience of innovation induced by natural disasters, using a unique dataset that includes related U.S. patent data, and flood, drought, and earthquake damage data for the years 1977 to 2005. To address the potential endogeneity of disaster damage, the control function approach is employed with instrumental variables constructed from disaster intensity measurements. The results show that impact-reducing innovations at the state level respond to national disaster damages in the U.S. In general, the impact of natural disasters is not localized to a state--that is, disaster damage in a state also stimulates innovations in more-distant states. This is in contrast with comparable existing cross-country evidence. The findings in this paper highlight a policy role for the federal government in more effectively spurring impact-reducing innovations nationwide. With the pressure of economic growth and the impact of climate change, water issues such as water shortage and pollution have substantial impacts on welfare and sustainability. Taking a view of innovation as adaptation to intensified water threats, the third chapter explores the impact of federal and state level regulatory changes with respect to drinking water quality, water pollution and water quantity in the U.S. on the level of relevant technological innovation. Based on a detailed review of relevant legislative acts, a unique dataset covering major amendments and additions to regulated contaminants lists is constructed to capture the changes of water governance in the U.S. in the past 30 years. In addition, technological patents pertaining to water quality and quantity are identified through a comprehensive search process. The empirical results show the impact of water regulations on innovation to be both statistically and economically significant.

Download or read book Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy written by Kenneth Ewart Boulding and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Water Service written by Hiba Ahmed and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Selected Water Resources Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: