'Private' Provision of Publicly Useful Information: An Empirical Analysis of Public Notification Rules for Safe Drinking Water Act

Abstract

The paper examines the incentives that affect public water systems' decisions to notify the public of contamination incidents. A unique dataset on the public notification (PN) of maximum contamination level violations is used to analyze the determinants of, and the impact of regulatory change on, PN timing decisions. A threshold shared frailty duration model is estimated to control for observations at zero and unobserved heterogeneity. Our results indicate that the severity of a contamination incident significantly delays PN timing after the new rules enacted in 2000, but has an insignificant impact before the new rules.

Keywords: public notification, water contamination, Safe Drinking Water Act, duration model

JEL Classification: D89, K32, Q53