Whether water systems should be owned and operated by governments or private firms is intensely controversial, and little empirical research sheds light on the issue. In this paper we use a panel dataset that includes every community water system in the U.S. from 1997-2003 to test the effects of...

Infrastructure industries - including telecommunications, electricity, water, and gas - underwent massive structural changes in the 1990s. During that decade, hundreds of privatization transactions valued at billions of dollars were completed in these sectors in developing and transition...