This broad review of the development of US water resource policy analysis and practice offers perspectives from several disciplines: law, economics, engineering, ecology and political science. The historical context provided goes back to the early 19th century, but the book concentrates on the...

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...