The Value of Piped Water and Sewers: Evidence from 19th Century Chicago

Michael Coury (), Toru Kitagawa (), Allison Shertzer and Matthew Turner ()
Additional contact information
Michael Coury: https://arts-sciences.buffalo.edu/economics/faculty/faculty-directory/coury.html
Toru Kitagawa: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctptk0/
Matthew Turner: https://economics.brown.edu/people/matthew-turner

No 25-07, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: We estimate the impact of piped water and sewers on property values in late 19th century Chicago. The cost of sewer construction depends sensitively on imperceptible variation in elevation, and such variation delays water and sewer service to part of the city. This delay provides quasi-random variation for causal estimates. We extrapolate ate estimates from our natural experiment to the area treated with water and sewer service during 1874-1880 using a new estimator. Water and sewer access increases property values by a factor of about 2.8. This suggests that benefits are large relative to the value of averted mortality, many other infrastructure projects, and construction costs

Keywords: Piped water and sewer access; Infrastructure; Extrapolation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L97 N11 O18 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66
Date: 2025-02-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/asset ... ers/2025/wp25-07.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Value of Piped Water and Sewers: Evidence from 19th Century Chicago (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedpwp:99546

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.21799/frbp.wp.2025.07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Beth Paul ().