Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-family buildings can often consume both hot and cold water at zero marginal cost. Using...

Water is critical not only to economic progress and sustainable development but most importantly, to human survival. Yet, the way water is valued suggests an inexhaustible supply, when the opposite is true. This paper examines if water rights in the Philippines are underpriced and looks at how...

Household water insecurity harms quality of life outcomes beyond health, for example the disutility of worrying about water availability or anger at disrupted plans. However, these outcomes are excluded from cost-benefit analyses of water supply interventions, which typically measure and value...

We design a survey to provide quantitative evidence about household demand for qualitative aspects of tap water supply. We focus on two characteristics that are of importance for households: water hardness and aesthetic quality in terms of taste, smell and appearance. Our survey elicits...

Groundwater currently provides 98 percent of all the drinking water supply in Bangladesh. Groundwater is found throughout Bangladesh but its quality (that is, arsenic and salinity contamination) and quantity (that is, water storage depletion) vary across hydrological environments, posing unique...

This paper reports on a contingent valuation study eliciting willingness to pay for a public program for the preservation of lagoon, beach and infrastructure in the island of S. Erasmo in the Lagoon of Venice. A referendum dichotomous choice approach with a follow-up question is used to obtain...

Although the U.S. spends billions of dollars a year controlling water pollution, there is little empirical evidence of comparable benefits. This study argues that measurement error in pollution data causes benefits to be underestimated. Using upstream concentrations as instrumental variables for...