Standard errors are clustered by watershed. People breathe the air quality where they live, and relocating to another airshed or some other defenses against air pollution are costly (Deschenes, Greenstone, and Shapiro 2017). This article assembles an array of new data to assess water pollutions trends, causes, and welfare consequences. 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. Search for other works by this author on: University of California, Berkeley and National Bureau of Economic Research. Although a point estimate of 0.41 for the ratio of benefits to costs does not exceed 1, one should interpret this value in light of the discussion from the next subsection that it may be a lower bound on true benefits. The point estimate implies that each grant decreases TSS by 1%, though this is imprecise. Before The Clean Water Act. After 1990, the trends approach zero. Fifth, the 25-mile radius is only designed to capture 95% of recreational trips. See main text for description of dwelling and baseline covariates. 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. The decline in mercury is noteworthy given the recent controversy of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) policy that would regulate mercury from coal-fired power plants. 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. 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. \end{equation}, \begin{equation} 1251 et seq. 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. River miles * pct. The Clean Water Act and Water Pollution, VI. Beginning in 1977, grants provided a higher 85% subsidy to projects using innovative technology, such as those sending waste-water through constructed wetlands for treatment. The other pollutants decrease as wellBOD falls by about 2.4%, fecal coliforms fall by 3.6%, and the probability that downstream waters are not swimmable by about half a percentage point. The curve 1 describes the offer function of a firm, and 2 of another firm. Panel B analyzes how grants affect log mean rental values. The positive coefficients in the richer specifications of columns (2) through (4) are consistent with increases in home values, though most are statistically insignificant. But Supreme Court decisions in 2001 and 2006 threw protections into question for 60 percent of our nation's streams and millions of acres of wetlands. 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. We analyze all these physical pollutants in levels, though Online Appendix Tables III and VI show results also in logs. Non-U.S. studies and more recent U.S. estimates find an even wider range (Gamkhar and Shah 2007). Contact: joseph.shapiro@berkeley.edu, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, (510) 642-3345, Fax (510) 643-8911. 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. What are pros and cons of the clean water act? - Answers The Clean Air Act: Successes and Challenges Since 1970 Agricultural Sediment Control, Environmental Regulations, Air and Water Pollution, and Infant Mortality in India. The USEPAs (2000a) cost-benefit analysis of the Clean Water Act estimates that nonuse values are a sixth as large as use values. This implies that pollution levels in upstream and downstream waters had similar trends before grants were received. Notably, almost half of this decline in state and local wastewater treatment capital spending occurred before the Clean Water Act. We find large declines in most pollutants that the Clean Water Act targeted. 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. We did not use these data because they focus on 1990 and later, mainly measure pesticides, and have a small sample. We also report event study graphs of outcomes relative to the year when a facility receives a grant: \begin{align} pH increased by 0.007pH units a year, meaning that waters became more basic (less acidic). The bid function is the consumers indifference curve in the trade-off between the price of a home and the amount of attribute j embodied in the home. Choosing Environmental Policy: Comparing Instruments and Outcomes in the United States and Europe, Contingent Valuation: From Dubious to Hopeless, Nor Any Drop to Drink: Public Regulation of Water Quality. These full data show more rapid declines before 1972 than after it. We discuss a range of pass-through estimates including these for cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis. This predictable spatial variation in the net benefits of water quality variation suggests that allowing the stringency of regulation to vary over space may give it greater net benefits (Muller and Mendelsohn 2009; Fowlie and Muller forthcoming). They suggest similar conclusions as Panels A and B. The Clean Water Act, passed with bipartisan support, was a historic milestone establishing a fundamental right to clean water.