Providing water and sewer services is extremely capital-intensive. Yet tariffs are often too low to recover operations, maintenance costs, capital replacement, and expansion. This study shows how much...

Abstract We investigate the price responsiveness of commercial and industrial water users in Nairobi, Kenya using billing data from 32,793 commercial and industrial customers over five years that…

Abstract Commercial businesses are vulnerable to shortages or reliability in water supply, particularly those for whom water is a significant input and water prices and quality are likely to be…

Abstract Providing piped water and sewer services is extremely capital intensive, yet most of this infrastructure is buried, hidden from citizens and ratepayers. Roman emperors built elaborate public…

Despite work’s importance in people’s overall sense of purpose in life, several studies measuring momentary well-being find that people are very unhappy while at work. These studies have focused on…

Abstract Millions of households devote significant time to collecting water. This paper examines the impact that water collection has on time allocation and emotional well-being in rural Kenya. We…

Abstract We calculate the first distributional statistics for municipal water use with 14.9 million monthly billing records for a half-million households in Cape Town, South Africa, from 2014 to 2018…

October 2020 When Cape Town, South Africa, experienced a severe drought, the city feared “Day Zero,” the day that water would no longer be supplied through water taps. We calculated Gini coefficients…

This policy note provides a snapshot of water and sanitation measures implemented by governments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 14 countries in the Global South: Costa Rica, El Salvador…

Over a dozen studies have examined how households who travel to collect water (about one-quarter of humanity) make choices about where and how much to collect. There is little evidence, however, that…