We calculate the first distributional statistics for municipal water supply deliveries using 14.9 million monthly billing records for a half-million households in Cape Town, South Africa, from 2014-2018. These years span a historic drought and a multi-faceted package of conservation programs that achieved a 50% city-wide drop in consumption. We find that the top 10% of households consumed 31% of water deliveries before the drought, with the Gini coefficient

Executive Summary

This paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a spatial regression discontinuity design implicit in China’s water quality monitoring system. Because water quality readings are important for political evaluations, and the monitoring stations only capture emissions from their upstream regions, local government officials are incentivized to enforce tighter environmental standards on firms immediately upstream of a monitoring station, rather  than  those  immediately  downstream.

The use of small-scale off-grid renewable energy for rural electrification is now seen as one sustainable energy solution. The expectations from such small-scale investment include meeting basic household energy needs and thereby improving some aspects of household welfare. However, these stated benefits remain largely hypothetical because there are data and methodological challenges in existing literature attempting to isolate such impacts. This paper uses field data from micro hydro schemes in Kenya and a propensity score matching technique to demonstrate such an impact.