research
Working Papers
Delayed Information and Behavioral Spillovers: Evidence from U.S. Drinking Water Violations
Abstract
Timely public disclosure is a central component of environmental regulation, yet little is known about how delays in mandated notifications affect protective behavior and its spillovers across communities. This paper studies how the timing of public notification influences household avoidance behavior following acute microbial drinking water violations in the United States. I combine administrative data on drinking water violations and enforcement actions with high-frequency retail scanner data on bottled water sales from 2006–2019. I show that avoidance behavior responds sharply to timely public notification but is substantially muted when notification is delayed or missing. Event-study evidence indicates that households do not respond to the onset of contamination itself, but rather to the arrival of salient public information. I further document spillover effects in neighboring communities that are not directly affected by violations. These spillovers arise primarily within shared media markets and dissipate with geographic and informational distance, highlighting the role of local media in transmitting risk information. Alternative channels such as social connectedness and socio-demographic similarity do not generate comparable spillovers in the absence of media exposure. Together, the results demonstrate that the effectiveness of right-to-know policies depends critically on implementation, particularly the timing of information release, and that information disclosure can induce behavioral responses beyond the targeted population.Federal Enforcement Retrenchment and Compliance under the Clean Water Act
Abstract
This paper studies the role of federal oversight in environmental regulation under cooperative federalism. I examine how the 2017 retrenchment in federal Clean Water Act enforcement affected compliance and pollution at major publicly owned wastewater treatment plants. The analysis combines plant-level inspections, enforcement actions, and discharge monitoring reports from ICIS-NPDES with ambient monitoring data from the Water Quality Portal, river network data from NHDPlus, and impaired waters and Total Maximum Daily Load data from ATTAINS in a nationwide panel spanning 2004 to 2024. Identification leverages pre-determined cross-plant variation in features that plausibly shape federal targeting but are fixed before the policy shift, including downstream pre-2012 TMDL completion intensity and downstream channel slope. I estimate how reduced federal oversight affects self-reported effluent concentrations, significant noncompliance, the timing and composition of federal and state enforcement responses, and downstream ambient water quality. I also test whether weaker federal oversight reduces the informativeness of self-reported discharges by weakening their relationship with downstream water quality. The paper contributes evidence on the deterrence value of the federal enforcement backstop beyond state-administered regulatory programs and builds a new nationwide panel of significant noncompliance and enforcement actions for major wastewater treatment plants from 2004 to 2024.Work in Progress
Eco-Labels, Consumer Demand, and Water Quality: Evidence from Laundry Detergents