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Inefficiencies in Local Infrastructure: Evidence from Drinking Water in California / Pierre Bodere, Giulia Brancaccio, Karam Kang.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Bodere, Pierre.
- Series:
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w35690.
- NBER working paper series no. w35690
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2026.
- Summary:
- Local elected officials oversee critical infrastructure, often with limited electoral accountability. This paper studies how this distorts investment across California drinking-water systems. We document that pollution responds to shifts in the political environment, motivating a dynamic model of public investment. We measure welfare returns to investment directly, combining event-study estimates of investment effectiveness and costs with those of residents' clean-water valuations, recovered from housing choices. Investment choices identify policymakers' responsiveness to those returns. Weak accountability diverts investment from high-return systems and conventional policies imperfectly offset these distortions: subsidy takeup is misaligned with returns, while uniform mandates induce welfare losses.
- Notes:
- August 2026.
- Print version record
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