Fanyu Wang

We conduct the first economic study of how individualized disclosure of water service line (LSL) material---mandated by the 2021 Lead and Copper Rule Revision---affects households’ beliefs about lead exposure and demand for mitigation and exposure assessment. We run a pre-registered field experiment in five U.S. cities (Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York City) involving around 2,000 households. Using a two-step geospatial workflow, we screen panelists to include only homes with known LSL status. Within each city, we randomly assign respondents to: (1) a control message describing service-line records or (2) a treatment that additionally discloses their building-specific LSL status. Before and after disclosure, we elicit beliefs and willingness to pay (WTP) for defensive mechanisms: 1) a pitcher filter, and 2) a laboratory inspection of tap-water lead, using an incentive-compatible Becker–DeGroot–Marschak mechanism. We are not aware of prior economics work that couples individualized disclosure about lead service lines with incentive-compatible stated-preference elicitation, allowing us to directly evaluate the effectiveness of the new federal information mandate and to characterize theoretically and empirically how households adjust beliefs and defensive investments in response to personalized lead-risk information.

Over the past two decades, China has made substantial investments in the Ultra-High Voltage (UHV) transmission network to address geographical energy mismatch by harnessing energy resources from the western and northern areas. Despite its scale, UHV expansion has been controversial due to its high costs and uncertain returns. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental impacts of UHV connection on local ambient air quality and identifies the underlying mechanisms by examining its effects on electricity production at the extensive and intensive margins. Exploiting the staggered rollout of 28 UHV projects through 2020, which connect 48 recipient cities and 13 source cities, we find that UHV connection leads to a 5.68 μg/m³ reduction in ambient SO₂ concentration in recipient cities, representing a 32% decline relative to the pre-connection average, with no significant SO₂ change in source cities. This pattern suggests a net reduction in population exposure to SO₂ pollution. The primary mechanism operates at the extensive margin. UHV connection reduces new coal power plant entry by 49% and new coal power capacity by 47% in recipient cities. In contrast, we find no significant effects on the emissions or output of existing power plants, indicating that SO₂ reductions are driven primarily by the discouraged investment in new coal power infrastructure rather than changes in existing plant operations. Overall, our results show that UHV transmission delivers substantial environmental benefits by altering long-run investment incentives and locking in cleaner electricity supply paths.