The drinking water infrastructure in the United States faces significant underinvestment. The 2009 American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card on America’s Infrastructure gave a D minus for the Nation’s drinking water infrastructure. In a 2007 study, the EPA found a 20-year investment...

In many cases policy makers employ multiple instruments to address a single environmental problem, but much of the economics literature on instrument choice focuses on comparing properties of single policy instruments. We argue that under a fairly broad set of circumstances the use of multiple...

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize an open access good. In particular, the demand for state fishing licenses is used to...

We randomized 43 villages in Bangladesh to receive information on well-water arsenic that emphasized water safety relative to the national standard (bright-line message) or provided additional information on how risks from exposure increase with arsenic levels (gradient message). The gradient...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial in rural Bangladesh to examine how household drinking-water choices were affected by two different messages about risk from naturally occurring groundwater arsenic. Households in both randomized treatment arms were informed about the arsenic level in...