Reports of Water Quality Violations induce Consumers to buy Bottled Water

Misuk Seo and Andreas Pape

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments require that water utilities mail drinking water quality reports to their customers annually. The public uses this information; the news of a water quality violation makes a household 21% more likely to purchase bottled water in the following year. We estimate that about 768,000 additional Americans purchase bottled water because of reported violations. We measure reports of violations with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data about violation reports from 1,300 water utilities, with a service population of approximately 10 million people total. We measure the consumer response using the Consumer Expenditure (CEX) survey from 2006-2008 with 10,874 households, and we match consumers to utilities geographically.

Keywords: Water Quality Reports; Environmental Information; Consumer Response to Information; Bottled Water Expenditure; Consumer Expenditure Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 Q25 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-mkt
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/28207/1/MPRA_paper_28207.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/28324/1/MPRA_paper_28324.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Reports of Water Quality Violations Induce Consumers to Buy Bottled Water (2015)
Journal Article: Reports of Water Quality Violations Induce Consumers to Buy Bottled Water (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:28207

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