Submitted by Sofia Villas-Boas on
SPUR Proposal
Social Pressure and Water Conservation
Consumer response to conservation policy is a key parameter of interest for public utilities. In particular, water utility districts around the country face difficult decisions during droughts and must find ways to incentivize consumer conservation behavior in order to meet self or state-imposed reductions. Public utilities are often constrained in their ability to use traditional pricing instruments, sparking interest in nontraditional instruments for evoking conservation behavior. This project draws on unique variation in social pressure exposure generated by media coverage of excessive water use during a recent drought ordinance in San Francisco's East Bay Area to investigate whether exposure induces additional water conservation beyond that elicited by a fee.
Students on this project will be exposed to working with and combining large datasets in R, acquiring census and demographic data along with measures of social media presence, interacting with spatial data (climate and parcel data) and satellite imagery, and conducting advanced econometric analysis (generalized difference-in-differences, event study, synthetic control, regression discontinuity design)
being able to use R