While the existing economic literature has extensively examined the effect of privatization on efficiency and profitability, its impact on quality remains underexplored. Understanding this relationship is particularly important in sectors where quality is essential for human health. This study investigates how privatizing U.S. drinking water systems affects quality. Given the competing incentives and regulatory pressures that influence a firm's quality decisions, the ultimate impact of privatization is theoretically ambiguous. Using hand-collected data on municipal systems sold to private companies and employing a propensity-weighted difference-in-differences approach, I find that privatization leads to 1.4 fewer Safe Drinking Water Act violations, a 20% decrease in an index of regulated contaminant concentrations, and a 30% decrease in an index for contaminants that pose an immediate threat to human health. These findings indicate that privatization leads to an overall improvement in drinking water quality and back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest economically meaningful benefits to public health, averaging at least $12.6 million per state in the sample.
This study estimates the effect of prenatal exposure to nitrate contamination in drinking water on preterm births. Linking birth record data to monthly measures of nitrate concentration levels in California's community water systems, I use panel fixed-effects regression models to compare birth outcomes across infants in the same water system who were exposed to differing levels of nitrate contamination. I have recently received individual birth record data from the California Department of Public Health. A preliminary, annual zip code-level analysis finds that having yearly average nitrate contamination levels at or above 5 mg/L (half the current regulatory limit) increases the share of total births that are premature by 0.4 percentage points.
The Effect of Stricter Shipping Fuel Sulfur Content Regulation on Air Pollution
Climate Change, Migration, and Health among Older Adults (with Tania Barham, Lori Hunter, and Dylan Connor)
Sweating through the Night: How Nighttime Heat Affects Student Outcomes (with Grant Webster)
My research statement can be found here.