Consequences of the Clean Water Act and the Demand for Water Quality*

By David A. Keiser, Joseph S. Shapiro. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018

294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, government and industry have invested over $1 trillion to abate water pollution, or $100 per person-year. Over half of U.S. stream and river miles, however, still violate pollution standards. We use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water pollution and its determinants, including 50 million pollution readings from 170,000 monitoring sites, to study water pollution’s trends, causes, and welfare consequences. We have three main findings. First, water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially since 1972, though were declining at faster rates before then. Second, the Clean Water Act’s grants to municipal wastewater treatment plants caused some of these declines. Third, the grants’ estimated effects on housing values are generally smaller than the grants’ costs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbd9ef58e916bc76ae3c036767047e24a0e8512f

Citations in the corpus

• Why Is Pollution from US Manufacturing Declining? The Roles of Environmental Regulation, Productivity, and Trade (2018, unknown): “…(Copeland and Taylor, 1994; Fabra and Reguant, 2014; Deschenes, Greenstone, and Shapiro, 2017; Isen, Rossin-Slater, and Walker, 2017; Keiser and Shapiro, 2017).4 Quasi-experimental studies can isolate the e↵ect of individual policies one-at-a-time, but regulators have implemented dozens of…”