Browsing by Author "Ritchie, Kaitlynn"
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Item Drinking Water and Environmental Justice in Post-Flint America: How Water Tests Increase Public Welfare(Department of Applied Economics and Statistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE., 2019-10-01) Ritchie, Kaitlynn; Maik, Kecinski; Kent D., MesserIn 2016, Flint, Michigan declared a State of Emergency due to high levels of lead in the city’s drinking water. Flint is predominantly black or African-American and the average income is significantly below the U.S. average. Extensive media coverage about these events may have adversely affected water quality perceptions in similarly disadvantaged communities but whose public drinking water systems have no outstanding violations. We conducted experiments in such a community to explore how individuals perceive their own drinking water and tests the effectiveness of two water quality treatments (water test kit and professional laboratory test). After collecting water samples from each participants home, these experiments revealed that the average willingness-to-accept to drink three ounces of their own water was $9.57. After treatment, their average willingness-to-accept was as low as $2.88. We show that inexpensive water test kits can be leveraged to rebuild trust in public water systems and enhance the welfare of disadvantaged communities.Item Perceptions of public drinking water in post-Flint America: field experiments in a socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhood(University of Delaware, 2018) Ritchie, KaitlynnPerceptions of the safety of public drinking water provided by municipal water utilities in the U.S. have likely been impacted by water contamination crises such as the one in Flint, Michigan. The implications of these negative perceptions weigh heaviest on socio-economically disadvantaged communities who face costly decisions to substitute, often times safe, tap water with bottled water. Our field experiments involved the collection of tap water samples from 122 households in a socio-economically disadvantaged community in Delaware – this community receives water from a drinking water utility that has no prior violations of the primary drinking standards. These experiments used an auction design to provide the first quantitative measure of community members’ perceptions of their own drinking water. We then tested the effectiveness of two different types of water tests (a do-it-yourself home test and a professional laboratory test). Our results revealed that none of the water tested were in violation of the U.S. primary drinking water standards for tested water quality parameters. However, participants in the community displayed substantial concern about the safety of their drinking water - the average amount of money we had to pay participants to drink their own water was $8.69. However, both water tests significantly reduced this concern (to $2.87 in the do-it-yourself home test treatment and to $3.72 in the professional laboratory test treatment). These experiments revealed that simple do-it-yourself home tests may be a cost-effective way to restore trust in public drinking water utilities that have no prior violations of the drinking water standards.