Improving firms’ compliance with the Clean Water Act through automated notifications (joint with Michael Greenstone)
The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires states to issue permits that regulate the amount of pollutants each facility can discharge into water bodies. Yet, each month, 11.6% of facilities report discharges above their permitted level. Moreover, many facilities reporting exceedances in a given month also reported exceedances in the preceding months. Currently, federal and state resources to enforce the CWA are shrinking. This project will test whether low-cost automated notifications can improve firm compliance with the CWA. By varying the content and the recipients of these notifications, we will also be able to unpack some of the mechanisms driving compliance decision within firms.
Hedonic model under imperfect information – Home seller disclosure requirement in Miami-Dade FL
This paper extends the canonical hedonic model to understand how imperfect information affects MWTP for averting flood risk. I exploit the structure of the Miami-Dade County Ordinance, which made it mandatory for a group of home sellers to disclose about the flood risk, to estimate the effect of additional information on property values. The policy reduces the home price by 4% on average. For single-family houses, where homebuyers are less knowledgeable about the flood risk in the absence of the disclosure policy, the effect is even more dramatic: 6% drop in the property value. These estimates are smaller than future insurance premiums, suggesting that the cost of a flood is not completely capitalized.
Does change in allocation of input affect efficiency?
I describe the recent change in allocation of coal for power generation in India and hypothesize that it has potential implications for efficiency of thermal power plants.