Conference Agenda

Mandated information disclosure about environmental hazards is widely used to help households recognize and avoid them. However, government audits of the Safe Drinking Water Act have documented persistent gaps in notification delivery. This paper studies how the timing of public notification influences household avoidance behavior following acute microbial violations. I combine administrative violations and enforcement records to construct the first national measure of public notification timing. Bottled water sales in affected counties rise by 14.7\% following timely notification, are muted when notification is delayed, and remain unchanged when notification is missing. Event-study evidence indicates that consumers respond to public information rather than to the violation itself. I further document spillovers of about 9\% in neighboring counties, concentrated within shared media markets and absent across alternative channels such as social connectedness or socio-demographic similarity.

Governments worldwide subsidize agricultural inputs to support farmers and increase food production. While subsidies can encourage technology adoption, subsidies may drive the overuse of some chemical inputs, exacerbating their environmental impact. This paper examines the unintended environmental and health consequences of increased fertilizer use driven by selective subsidy reforms. In 2010, India implemented a fertilizer subsidy change favoring nitrogen, which led to lower prices relative to phosphorus and potassium fertilizers. Leveraging the timing of this policy and exploiting exogenous variation in pre-determined geographic characteristics such as soil texture and river flow direction, we find significant effects of the subsidy on nitrogen pollution in downstream water bodies and infant mortality in downstream rural areas. For every 1 % percent increase in nitrate levels, we find a 1.6 % increase in rural infant mortality rates.

This paper explores road construction’s unintended consequences on health. Drawing evidence from a large-scale road development program in Ethiopia, we investigate the impact of road construction on infant mortality. Along major routes, we find that an additional road increases the probability of infant mortality by 3 percentage points. The empirical evidence suggests that waste exposure associated with road construction is a likely explanation for our findings. A large set of robustness checks rules out confounding factors such as migration and urbanization, and alternative mechanisms such as traffic pollution.

There is no known safe level of lead pollution exposure. Many countries have taken steps in the last half century to remove lead from their environments, but, at times, these policies can cause pollution sources to shift to countries with weaker regulatory environments. Previous studies have theorized about and empirically documented this ‘pollution haven’ phenomenon, but few have examined the costs borne by recipient communities. In the setting we study, a 2009 tightening of environmental standards in the United States caused used lead-acid battery recycling, an industry that emits large amounts of lead pollution, to shift to Mexico. We estimate the effects of this increased industrial activity and associated pollution on student learning in recipient communities in Mexico. We use data from a nationwide test in Spanish and math, conducted from 2006 to 2013. We compare test scores before and after the 2009 U.S. policy change among students attending schools near and downwind of Mexican recycling facilities and those studying farther away. We estimate effects on test scores of negative 0.05-0.09 standard deviations, with effects being slightly stronger for math than Spanish. Comparing dynamic effects across grades, we find suggestive evidence that effects are stronger for students who were younger in 2009. We also compare effects across communities, showing that the costs to education are heavily concentrated in communities that were already worse off before the 2009 change in lead-acid battery recycling activity. The results of our study underline the importance of considering unintended consequences and cross-border spillovers when regulating toxic pollutants. The heterogeneity of effects across communities highlights the need for more research on the costs of lead pollution exposure in low- and middle-income countries, where the vast majority of exposure occurs today.