Property rights are widely prescribed for addressing overextraction of common pool resources, yet causal evidence of their effectiveness remains elusive. We develop a model of dynamic groundwater extraction to demonstrate how a spatial regression discontinuity design exploiting a...

Fresh water supplies increasingly are under stress in many parts of the world due to rising populations, higher per capita incomes and corresponding consumption, greater environmental concerns, and the effects of climate change. Water rights and markets are part of the institutional menus for...

The construction of municipal water systems was a major event in the history of American cities -- bringing relief from disease, providing resources to combat fires, attracting business investment, and promoting development generally. Although the first large-scale municipal water system in the...

Providing clean water requires maintenance, as well as the initial connections that are typically measured. Frequently, the water supply fails in the developing world, especially when users don't pay the marginal cost of water. This paper uses the timing of frequent, unexpected water service...

Poor water quality and sanitation are leading causes of mortality and disease in developing countries. However, interventions providing toilets in rural areas have not substantially improved health, likely because of incomplete coverage and low usage. This paper estimates the impact of an...

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...

The paper provides an integrated framework to assess water markets in terms of their institutional underpinnings and the three 'pillars' of integrated water resource management: economic efficiency, equity and environmental sustainability. This framework can be used: (1) to benchmark different...

This paper considers the role of incentive based climate adaptation policies. It uses the early literature on pricing and capacity choices under demand uncertainty to describe how revised price structures for the substitutes for climate services can be treated as anticipatory adaptation. In many...

Nearly 40% of England's privately built waterworks were municipalised in the late 19th century. We examine how this affected public health by pairing annual mortality data for over 600 registration districts, spanning 1869 to 1910, with detailed waterworks information. Identification is aided by...