IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/27996.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Lead in Drinking Water and Birth Outcomes: A Tale of Two Water Treatment Plants

Author

Listed:
  • Dhaval M. Dave
  • Muzhe Yang

Abstract

The recent lead-in-water crisis in Newark has renewed concerns about the crisis being a widespread problem in the nation. Using data on the exact home addresses of pregnant women residing in the city combined with information on the spatial boundary separating areas within the city serviced by two water treatment plants, we exploit an exogenous change in water chemistry that resulted in lead leaching into the tap water of one plant's service area, but not the other's, to identify a causal effect of prenatal lead exposure on fetal health. We find robust evidence of adverse health impacts, which has important policy implications in light of the substantial number of lead water pipes that remain in use as part of our aging infrastructure and the cost-benefit calculus of lead abatement interventions.

Suggested Citation

  • Dhaval M. Dave & Muzhe Yang, 2020. "Lead in Drinking Water and Birth Outcomes: A Tale of Two Water Treatment Plants," NBER Working Papers 27996, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27996
    Note: CH EEE EH PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w27996.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hill, Elaine L. & Ma, Lala, 2022. "Drinking water, fracking, and infant health," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    2. Gazze, Ludovica & Heissel, Jennifer, 2021. "Infrastructure upgrades and lead exposure: Do cities face trade-offs when replacing water mains?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).
    3. Heather Klemick & Ann Wolverton & Bryan Parthum & Kristin Epstein & Sandra Kutzing & Sarah Armstrong, 2024. "Factors Influencing Customer Participation in a Program to Replace Lead Pipes for Drinking Water," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 87(3), pages 791-832, March.
    4. Shooshan Danagoulian & Daniel Grossman & David Slusky, 2022. "Health Care Following Environmental Disasters: Evidence from Flint," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(4), pages 1060-1089, September.
    5. Rui Wang & Xi Chen & Xun Li, 2022. "Something in the pipe: the Flint water crisis and health at birth," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 35(4), pages 1723-1749, October.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27996. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.