The economics and environmental policy of the Safe Drinking Water Act

This dissertation on the economics and environmental policy of the Safe Drinking Water Act in the United States includes three essays. The first paper investigates how individuals respond to publicly provided risk information about the quality of drinking water. After testing whether receiving the risk information of health violations in drinking water increases the expenditures and likelihood that individuals buy bottled water, using the Heckman's two-stage method, main finding is that total expenditures on bottled water increased by 34.3 percent from water quality violations. This impact consists of two parts, the average expenditure and the number of purchasers of bottled water.;The second paper measures the effects on drinking water of the revised arsenic standard using two treatment and control group pairs. The results from the fixed-effect regressions show that about 10 percent of the effect is the new policy difference; the treatment groups react more to the new arsenic standard than the control groups. It is clear evidence that the drinking water policy for the new arsenic standard is effective in reducing arsenic quantity. It implies that the water systems lower their quantity of arsenic because of a stringent standard and it creates a stronger incentive to lower arsenic content in water due to the negative publicity.;The third paper investigates whether reporting contaminant levels to customers cause water utilities to control contamination. Using a series of panel data sets, our results show mailing for large water utilities that are required to deliver water reports directly to the public have statistically significant. In inorganic chemicals the effect of mailing is to reduce more for large water utilities about 4 percent of standard per year than for small water utilities. In synthetic organic chemicals the effect of delivering reports directly to the public is also to decrease their contaminant level, but the reduction magnitude of coefficients for small water utilities is relatively bigger than for large water utilities. This paper finds that the effect of providing annual reports varies with time and across contaminant groups.