We study pollution cleanup in the Ganges in Varanasi, India. Voters elect politicians and elected politicians decide … how much pollution to clean up. Between the two time periods, there is an election. Politicians are sincere or insincere …. The marginal cost of public funds ζ measures how efficiently elected politicians transform tax receipts into pollution …

We exploit the public good attributes of Ganges water pollution cleanup and theoretically analyze an aggregate economy … pollution cleanup in these two cities ought to be provided in a centralized or in a decentralized manner. We first determine the … compute the optimal amount of water pollution cleanup in the two cities in a decentralized regime in which spending on cleanup …

We study how spillovers from water pollution cleanup in the Ganges affect social welfare in an aggregate economy … consisting of Kanpur and Varanasi, two cities through which this river flows. We view pollution cleanup in both cities as a local … public good and point out that, if Kanpur cleans up pollution in the Ganges, then Varanasi obtains some spillover benefit and …