Household Responses to Drinking Water Contamination: Evidence from Public Notification, Bottled Water Consumption, and Infant Health

This paper examines household avoidance behavior in response to drinking water contamination under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). A major challenge in studying behavioral responses to public notifications is that the timing recorded in the Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) often does not accurately reflect when contamination information becomes publicly available. To address this issue, this study combines SDWIS violation records with detailed water testing data from the EPA’s Six-Year Review (SYR) to infer more accurate notification timing for Tier 1 drinking water violations. The analysis links public water system service areas to weekly store-level bottled-water sales data and estimates dynamic responses using a staggered event-study design. Preliminary results show a sharp increase in bottled-water sales immediately following contamination notifications. When notification timing is measured using the SYR generation date, bottled-water sales increase by approximately 40 percent in the week after notification, substantially larger than estimates based on EPA enforcement dates. The findings suggest that inaccurate administrative timing may substantially attenuate estimated behavioral responses in prior studies and highlight the importance of precise notification timing when evaluating environmental information disclosure policies.