EH.Net Abstracts in Economic History

              EHS Abstract Submission
                    (c) 1997 EH.Net
-----------------------------------------------------------
              Name:  Werner Troesken
               Email:  troesken+ at pitt.edu
         Institution:  University of Pittsburgh  

         Co-author:  None
 
             Title:  Typhoid Rates and the Public Acquisition of
Private Waterworks, 1880-1920  

  Internet Address
of abstracted work:  Not available on the Internet  

           By mail:  
                     Werner Troesken
                     Department of History
                     University of Pittsburgh
                     Pittsburgh PA 15260 USA  

          Language:  English
 
          Abstract:
   During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many
cities and towns socialized their water systems.  At the same
time, typhoid rates fell.  Progressive Era reformers suggested a
causal link between the rise of public ownership and the decline
of typhoid.  Private water companies, the argument went, had
little incentive to invest in the filtration systems necessary to
prevent typhoid.  Publicly owned companies, in contrast, were not
obligated to turn a profit and were more willing to undertake
unprofitable, but socially beneficial, capital investments.  In
this paper, I test the claim that the public acquisition of
private water companies reduced typhoid rates.	Constructing a
panel of cities, I estimate a two-way fixed effects model.  This
model controls for the unobservable, city-specific effects that
would otherwise confound such an analysis.  This estimating
procedure identifies the effects of changes in ownership: did
typhoid rates fall faster after a city switched from private to
public provision of  water?

 
      Bibliography:  Troesken, Werner. "Typhoid Rates and the
Public Acquisition of Private Waterworks, 1880-1920." Paper
presented at the Cliometrics Conference, University of Toronto,
May 1997. 

 
                  Subject:  I
 Geographical Area:  7
      Country/Region:  United States
           Time Period:  7, 8