In this paper, we examine the impact of poor water quality on avoidance behavior by estimating the change in bottled water purchases in response to drinking water violations. Using data from a national grocery chain matched with water quality violations, we find an increase in bottled water...

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to non-random...

In this paper we consider how the dental industry responded to the addition of fluoride to public drinking water. We take advantage of the staggered introduction of fluoridation throughout the country to analyze the changes in numbers of within-county dentists relative to physicians in the years...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of informational regulatory approaches by analyzing the impact of smog alerts issued on consecutive days on discretionary outdoor activities in Southern California. Short-run adjustments to transitory risk entail costs that are likely to influence the...

We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s. Our work offers several innovations: First, many previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution. In contrast, the experience of California in the 1990s is clearly relevant to...

Healthy teeth are a vital and visible component of general well-being, but there is little systematic evidence to demonstrate their economic value. In this paper, we examine one element of that value, the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes, by exploiting variation in access to...

A pervasive problem in the literature on the health costs of pollution is that optimizing individuals may compensate for increases in pollution by reducing their exposure to protect their health. This implies that estimates of the health effects of pollution may vastly understate the full...

We examine the effect of air pollution on school absences using unique administrative data for elementary and middle school children in the 39 largest school districts in Texas. These data are merged with information from monitors maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. To control for...