Research
Fields of interest: Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, Agriculture, International Trade, Public Policy. Climate Change, Energy
Work in progress
Valuation of forests for drinking water across the Southeastern U.S.
Recent research indicates that forest preservation in rapidly urbanizing regions like the Southeastern U.S. can offer water quality protection services (Caldwell, 2023), but it is less clear what the net costs and benefits of forest preservation might be for drinking water utilities. We contribute to a growing literature on land use and water quality interactions by linking ecological and economic production functions that relate to changes in forest cover and water quality. We develop an approach to estimate the value of water quality improvements for drinking water, in terms of avoided water treatment cost, using cost estimates provided by regional utilities through a targeted survey. We use observations from a survey conducted in the Southeastern United States to explore which physical and economic factors are most influential in driving variation in reported treatment costs. Factors considered in the study include an estimated change in turbidity or suspended solids, change in total organic carbon, change in nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus), location and distance of surface water intakes in the watershed, the volume of water intake, climate, and rainfall projections, and input costs (labor, etc.) in the region. We expect to observe an increase in turbidity/TOC as forestland is converted to developed land, which in-turn would increase the water treatment costs. These results will highlight the potential economic value of forest preservation for water quality maintenance; and hence, inform forest management policies.
Regional Water Transfer and Economic Growth: Theory and Evidence
This paper explores the economic impacts of a rural-urban water transfer on an urban economy using the 1920’s Owens Valley water transfer to Los Angeles (LA) County, one of the largest and most controversial rural-urban water transfers ever undertaken in the United States, as a natural experiment. We first develop a growth-theoretic model incorporating a water transfer, and explore the transfer’s impact on urban economic growth. With a testable hypothesis from the theoretical model, we then apply synthetic control and difference-in-differences methods to a newly constructed historical dataset to examine the overall transfer effects on LA County’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, as well as its effects on GDP’s two main components—the value of agricultural and manufacturing output per capita. We also assess the water transfer’s associated impact on urban sprawl. We find a positive effect overall, i.e., the 1920’sOwens Valley
water transfer impelled decades-long GDP growth in LA County. The county’s overall growth has in turn been driven by growth in its per-capita value of manufacturing output, at the expense of agricultural output. We also find a positive transfer effect on urban sprawl within the county.
Publications
Book Chapters
Edwards, E.C., Nehra, A. (2020), “Importance of freshwater for irrigation.” M. Goldstein and D. DellaSala Eds. Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes 1st Edition.