But municipal investments that occurred were closely connected to grants, and point estimates imply that the grant costs in our data accurately represent the actual change in spending. The bottom decile of counties, for example, includes ratios of measured benefits to costs of below 0.01. A third question involves substitution. Twenty Years of the Clean Water Act: Has U.S. Water Quality Improved? The Roles of Environmental Regulation, Productivity, and Trade. Our approach focuses on the effects of cleaning up an individual site and is not as well suited to capture the potentially distinct effects of cleaning up entire river systems. Column (4) includes imputed home values for the nonmetro areas that were not in the 1970 or 1980 census.24, Clean Water Act Grants: Costs and Effects on Home Values (|${\$}$|2014B|$\mathrm n$|). These regressions are described in equation (4) from the text. Identification from a national time series is difficult, since other national shocks like the 19731975 and early 1980s recessions, high inflation and interest rates, and the OPEC crisis make the 1960s a poor counterfactual for the 1970s and 1980s. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. Online Appendix FigureV shows the effect of a grant by distance downstream from a treatment plant; few data are available to estimate effects separately for each five-mile bin along the river, and estimates are correspondingly less precise. These graphs also suggest that existing evaluations of the Clean Water Act, which typically consist of national trend reports based on data from after 1972, may reflect forces other than the Clean Water Act. The change in the value of housing is estimated by combining the regression estimates of TableV with the baseline value of housing and rents from the census. River miles * pct. Other water pollution research generally specifies BOD and TSS in levels; practices vary for fecal coliforms. CBO (1985) dictates this time period because it provides the national total state and local spending data underlying this graph. TableV analyzes how Clean Water Act grants affect housing. The Clean Water Act, passed with bipartisan support, was a historic milestone establishing a fundamental right to clean water. The share of waters that are fishable has grown by 12 percentage points since the Clean Water Act. The hedonic price schedule provides information about willingness to pay for amenity j because it reflects the points of tangency between consumer bid curves and firm offer curves. Q_{pdy}=\gamma G_{py}d_{d}+X_{pdy}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\eta _{pd}+\eta _{py}+\eta _{dwy}+\epsilon _{pdy}. Nutrients were not targeted in the original Clean Water Act but are a focus of current regulation. Lack civil or criminal penalties for violations. Pass-through of Grants to Municipal Sewerage Capital Spending. Primary focus: Establish cooperation between feds and states. [1] It is one of the United States' first and most influential modern environmental laws, and one of the most comprehensive air quality laws in the world. We convert the data to calendar years using data from these surveys on the month when each governments fiscal year ends, assuming that government expenditure is evenly distributed across months. Rows 2 and 3 are aggregated from GICS microdata. First, we limit regression estimates to the set of tracts reporting home values in all four years 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. Problem with enforcement. saturation increase/10, 7. Two are marginally significant (Panel C, column (1)), though the precision and point estimate diminish with the controls of column (2). It is interesting to consider possible explanations for these slowing trends. The simplest specification of column (1), which includes rivers with water quality data, implies that it cost |${\$}$|0.67 million a year to increase dissolved oxygen saturation in a river-mile by 10%; the broadest specification of column (3), which assumes every treatment plant has 25 miles of downstream waters affected, implies that it cost |${\$}$|0.53 million a year. In Panel B, the year variables are recentered around 1972. Our topic is clean water and sanitation. Many travel demand papers use small surveys that report distance traveled to a specific lake or for a narrow region. Hence decreases in acidic sulfur air pollution may have contributed to decreases in acidic water pollution. \end{equation}, \begin{equation} The USEPAs (2000a) cost-benefit analysis of the Clean Water Act estimates that nonuse values are a sixth as large as use values. The wastewater treatment plants that are the focus of this article also receive effluent permits through the NPDES program, so our analysis of grants may also reflect NPDES permits distributed to wastewater treatment plants. The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act will: Online Appendix E.2 investigates heterogeneity in grants effects on water pollution and cost-effectiveness. Most of these estimates are small and actually negative. We recognize the potential importance of nonuse values for clean surface waters and the severe challenges in accurately measuring these values.26 Other categories potentially not measured here include the value for commercial fisheries, industrial water supplies, lower treatment costs for drinking water, and safer drinking water.27 Evidence on the existence and magnitude of the benefits from these other channels is limited, though as mentioned already, recreation and aesthetics are believed to account for a large majority of the benefits of clean surface waters. Column (4) reweights estimates using the inverse of the estimated propensity score for inclusion in the balanced panel of cities. One possible channel is that wages change to reflect the improvement in amenities (Roback 1982). 1251 et seq. Q_{icy}=\alpha y_{y}+X_{icy}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\delta _{i}+\epsilon _{icy}. Row 5 is calculated by multiplying each grant by the parameter estimate in Online Appendix TableVI, row 13, column (2), and applying the result to all waters within 25 miles downstream of the treatment plant. We also estimate linear water pollution trends using the following equation: \begin{equation} Leads decrease of about 10% a year may be related to air pollution regulations, such as prohibiting leaded gasoline. Panels A and B show different ranges of values on their y-axes. From Exxon to BP: Has Some Number Become Better than No Number? Contact: joseph.shapiro@berkeley.edu, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, (510) 642-3345, Fax (510) 643-8911. Provide federal assistance to control municipal discharges of wastewater. Analysis includes homes within a given distance of downstream river segments. The only econometric analysis we know of such policies tests how the French policy of jointly taxing industrial air pollution and subsidizing abatement technologies affected emissions, using data from 226 plants (Millock and Nauges 2006). It may be useful to highlight differences in how the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts answer four important questions about environmental regulation. 1974 Report to the Congress. We also report event study graphs of outcomes relative to the year when a facility receives a grant: \begin{align} It remains one of our nation's most vital safeguards for the health and safety of our communities and our environment. When we fit the change in home values, we do so both for only the balanced panel of tract-years reporting home values, and for all tract-years. Annual cost to increase dissolved oxygen, Panel D: Log total value of housing stock, Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Regulating Untaxable Externalities: Are Vehicle Air Pollution Standards Effective and Efficient? Grant project costs include federal grant amount and required local capital expenditure. Most of these alternative approaches have similar sign, magnitude, and precision as the main results. The negatives is it is not strongly enforced, violators only pay a small fine, countries can exempt themselves from certain species. The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 (Proposition 1) will provide $4.2 billion to projects across New York State that contribute to improving public health, increasing access to nature, and protecting people from deadly heat and flooding. In Panel A, the main explanatory variable excludes required municipal contributions, while Panel B includes them. Sample size in all regressions is 6,336. Asterisks denote p-value < .10 (*), < .05 (**), or < .01 (***). GLS estimates the effect for the average pollution reading rather than for the average plant downstream year. What are pros and cons of legalism? Most recent cost-benefit analyses of the Clean Water Act estimate that a substantial share of benefits come from recreation and aesthetics channels (Lyon and Farrow 1995; Freeman 2000; USEPA 2000a). Table provides information about pros & cons of various water quality data submission tools, for use of tribal water quality programs under Clean Water Act Section 106 Tribal grants program. GLS based on the number of underlying pollution readings in each plant downstream year is an efficient response to heteroskedasticity since we have grouped data. Panel A estimates pass-through modestly above 1 since it excludes the required municipal copayment. We estimate the value of wetlands for flood mitigation across the US using detailed flood claims and land use data. We also report unweighted estimates. Column (3) include all homes within 1 mile, and column (4) includes homes within 25 miles. Our recreation data also represent all trips, and water-based recreation trips might require different travel distances. The curve 2 describes the bid function for another type of consumer. See Kline and Walters (2016) for a related analysis in education. Online Appendix FigureVI shows national trends in federal versus state and local spending on wastewater treatment capital over 19601983.21 State and local spending on wastewater treatment capital declined steadily from a total of |${\$}$|43 billion in 1963 to |${\$}$|22 billion in 1971 and then to |${\$}$|7 billion annually by the late 1970s. The Clean Water Act was produced as a means for the EPA to implement pollution control programs alongside setting water quality standards for all contaminants in surface waters. Part I: State Pollution Control Programs, The Role of Water Quality Perceptions in Modelling Lake Recreation Demand, The International Handbook on Non-Market Environmental Valuation, The Displacement of Local Spending for Pollution Control by Federal Construction Grants, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in Chinas Political Promotion Incentives, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, The Missing Benefits of Clean Water and the Role of Mismeasured Pollution Data, The Low but Uncertain Measured Benefits of US Water Quality Policy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Replication Data for Consequences of the Clean Water Act and the Demand for Water Quality, Evaluating Public Programs with Close Substitutes: The Case of Head Start. Adding rental units in column (3) barely changes this estimate. Q_{pdy} & =\sum _{\tau =-10}^{\tau =25}\gamma _{\tau }1[G_{p,y+\tau }=1]d_{d}+X_{pdy}^{^{\,\,\prime }}\beta +\eta _{pd}+\eta _{py}+\eta _{dwy}+\epsilon _{pdy}. Analyses of the Clean Air Act relying solely on hedonic estimates generally have smaller cost-benefit ratios; the EPAs benefit numbers for air pollution rely heavily on estimated mortality impacts. These confidence regions do not reject the hypothesis that the ratio of the change in home values to the grants costs is zero but do reject the hypothesis that the change in home values equals the grants costs. The 1972 to 2001 change equals the fitted value Year*29 + Year*1[Year>=1972]*29. The clean water act is making sure every person has clean water to drink. The census long form has housing data and was collected from one in six households on average, but the exact proportion sampled varies across tracts. Data and code replicating tables and figures in this article can be found in Keiser and Shapiro (2018), in the Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/2JRHN6. Third, this analysis is different from the question of what municipal spending (and pollution and home values) would be in a world without the Clean Water Act. These comparisons also highlight features of the Clean Water Act that are not widely recognized and could lead it to have lower net benefits than some other environmental regulation. This assumption could also fail if changes in governments effectiveness at receiving grants are correlated with governments effectiveness at operating treatment plants. Moreover, we are not aware of any existing ex post estimates of the cost required to make a river-mile fishable or to decrease dissolved oxygen deficits. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS Column (1) reports a basic difference-in-differences regression with nominal dollars. As mentioned in the introduction, other recent analyses estimate benefits of the Clean Water Act that are smaller than its costs, though these other estimates note that they may also provide a lower bound on benefits. It is possible that areas with more pollution data may be of greater interest; for example, FigureI, Panel C shows more monitoring sites in more populated areas. The product is a tablet that turns any type of substance into clean substance. Panel A shows modest evidence that in the years after a plant receives a grant, the values of homes within 0.25 mile of the downstream river increase. *The Clean Water Program, which calls for $790 million for municipal-treatment improvements, nonpoint-source-control projects, aquatic-habitat restoration and implementation of management plans. Year-by-year trends for the other pollutants in the main analysisthe share of waters that are not swimmable, BOD, fecal coliforms, and TSSshow similar patterns (Online Appendix FigureIII). Decent Essays. Objective versus Subjective Assessments of Environmental Quality of Standing and Running Waters in a Large City, 1967 Census of Manufactures: Water Use in Manufacturing, National Water Quality Inventory. We find similar trends for the pollutant they study in lakes, though we show that other pollutants are declining in lakes and that most pollutants are declining in other types of waters. The Clean Water Act was passed by a bi-partisan vote in the early 1970s after decades of Congress trying unsuccessfully to get the states to clean up pollution in our nation's waterways.

Canadian Slang Insults, Cubicle Name Plates Printable, Brandon Kyle Goodman Yawn, Articles C