Excess mortality in urban areas was largely reduced at the beginning of the twentieth century partly due to the supply of abundant and clean water through centralized water systems. This paper studies the role of local outbreaks of infectious diseases during the nineteenth century in the adoption of centralized water systems in early American cities. Using a large corpus of archival newspaper data from 1800 to 1896, I construct a novel measure of city-level outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, and typhoid fever. Results indicate that (1) infectious disease local outbreaks led to an increase in the number of waterworks constructed by cities and were pivotal in the decision to construct around 12% of waterworks in operation by 1897; (2) Cities’ response to typhoid outbreaks was twice as large as that following yellow fever or cholera outbreaks. (3) Private companies constructed more new waterworks after local outbreaks while local governments operated more improvements and extensions of existing public waterworks as well as takeovers of private water companies. Finally, I discuss the potential role of various socio-demographic factors.

This paper studies the role of water infrastructure as a means of adaptation to climate change. Specifically, I investigate how past investments in water infrastructure mitigate the economic effects of floods across U.S. counties. I construct a simple statistical framework to aggregate in a structured way detailed information on the entire population of rain and local flood events in the conterminous U.S. between 1996 and 2019. The analysis exploits an Amendment to the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1977, as an exogenous shifter in sewer system quality, to identify its effect on flood occurrence. Results indicate that, absent restrictions imposed by the Amendment, the number of damaging floods occurring would have been lower by 10%. Moreover, I estimate a flood mitigation benefit-to-cost ratio of 9 to 1 associated with an improvement in sewer systems quality, saving nearly $22.6 million for the average county.

We quantify the effects of the “zero-COVID” policy using a rich set of county-level lockdown events in China and nighttime satellite imagery. We find that more stringent lockdowns induce a large contemporaneous decline in nightlight followed by a slow recovery, which happens at least two quarters after lockdown enactment. Absent widespread contagions, a county under total lockdown incurs on average a 6% GDP loss compared to those without restrictions. The negative effect is particularly persistent in service-heavy areas as opposed to manufacturing-heavy areas. There exists some evidence consistent with spillover effects near counties under lockdown, but these effects are short-lived.