Clean Water Act Grants and Water Pollution, Steinwender, Gundacker, and Wittmann 2008, Muehlenbachs, Spiller, and Timmins (2015), U.S. Government Accountability Office 1994, https://ofmpub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control, https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, 6. Panel C estimates the effect of grants on log housing units and Panel D on the log of the total value of the housing stock. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. Its mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. We report both the double-difference and triple-difference estimators for both outcomes, and obtain qualitatively similar conclusions. But if local governments ultimately pay these costs, they could depress home values. Even without the hedonic estimates of the next section, one can combine cost-effectiveness numbers with estimates from other studies of the value of clean waters to obtain a cost-benefit analysis of these grants. 5 Things To Know About NY's Clean Water, Air, And Green Jobs Bond Act Ignoring such a large source of pollution can make aggregate abatement more costly. Drinking water treatment falls under a separate set of regulations, the Safe Drinking Water Act. This literature also finds that federal grants that require local matching funds and specify the grants purpose, both characteristics of the Clean Water Act grants, tend to have higher pass-through rates. Our interpretation is that once the Clean Water Act began, cities became less likely to spend municipal funds on wastewater treatment capital. "Clean Water Act" became the Act's common name with amendments in 1972. What are pros and cons of the clean water act? - Answers Estimates appear in Online Appendix TableVIII and discussion appears in Online Appendix E.3. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Volume II, Clean Water Construction Grants Program News, Handbook of Procedures: Construction Grants Program for Municipal Wastewater Treatment Works, The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act, 1970 to 1990, A Benefits Assessment of Water Pollution Control Programs Since 1972: Part 1, The Benefits of Point Source Controls for Conventional Pollutants in Rivers and Streams: Final Report, A Retrospective Assessment of the Costs of the Clean Water Act: 1972 to 1997: Final Report, Progress in Water Quality: An Evaluation of the National Investment in Municipal Wastewater Treatment, The National Costs to Implement TMDLs (Draft Report): Support Document 2, The Clean Water and Drinking Water Infrastructure Gap Analysis, ATTAINS, National Summary of State Information, Water Pollution: Information on the Use of Alternative Wastewater Treatment Systems, From Microlevel Decisions to Landscape Changes: An Assessment of Agricultural Conservation Policies, American Journal of Agricultural Economics. We also estimate linear water pollution trends using the following equation: \begin{equation} PDF Clean Water Act and Pollutant Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) Considering all owner-occupied homes within 25 miles of the river, the estimated ratio of the grants aggregate effects on home values to the grants costs is 0.26. Row 8 equals row 1 divided by 30 times row 6. The EPA did audit grants to minimize malfeasance. \end{equation}, Political Internalization of Economic Externalities and Environmental Policy, What Are Cities Worth? Data include decennial census years 19702000. WHAT'S AT STAKE? These controls could help address possible omitted variables bias due to city growth in these difference-in-differences regressions, but are potentially a case of bad controls (Angrist and Pischke 2009) because they could be affected by grants. Resources for the Future, Public Policies for Environmental Protection, The Impact of Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: A Synthesis of the Conceptual and Empirical Literature, Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: Principles and Practice, Analysis of National Water Pollution Control Policies: 2. First "water pollution control" legislation. Column (1) shows estimates for homes within a quarter mile of downstream waters. Standard errors are clustered by watershed. The Clean Water Act (CWA) establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters. These estimates divide treatment plants into 10 deciles of the number of housing units in 2000 within 25 miles of downstream river segments. Non-U.S. studies and more recent U.S. estimates find an even wider range (Gamkhar and Shah 2007). 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. Online Appendix FigureVII illustrates. Some studies in historic or developing country settings, where drinking water regulation is limited, relate surface water quality to health (Ebenstein 2012; Greenstone and Hanna 2014; Alsan and Goldin forthcoming). Data cover 19622001. The Clean Water Act, passed with bipartisan support, was a historic milestone establishing a fundamental right to clean water. The ultimate entity responsible for local capital costs and operation and maintenance costs is ambiguous because local governments may receive other payments from state or federal governments to help cover these costs. 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. These studies ask: Municipal spending data from Annual Survey of Governments and Census of Governments. \end{align}, To estimate the pass-through of Clean Water Act grants to local expenditure, we regress cumulative municipal sewerage capital expenditures, \begin{equation} Annual cost to increase dissolved oxygen, Panel D: Log total value of housing stock, Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Cost-effective regulation equates marginal abatement costs across sources, which requires regulating all sources. Lack civil or criminal penalties for violations. 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. These full data show more rapid declines before 1972 than after it. Calculations include grants given in 19622000. Some nutrients like ammonia and phosphorus are declining, while others like nitrates are unchanged.