Rapidly‐growing concern among scholars and policy makers over residential drinking water affordability in the United States highlights the need to identify and assess the efficacy of potential solutions to address this problem. Accordingly, in this advanced review of the literature, we examine the state of scholarly evidence over the last 30 years on the prevalence and effectiveness of strategies to address household drinking water affordability in the United States. We classify interventions into four categories: rate structure designs, water efficiency programs, recurring bill assistance, and crisis relief. Our findings are twofold. First, the conceptual literature on affordability interventions is fairly robust, but demonstrates both tradeoffs and complementarities across the four approaches. Second, despite employing a PRISMA approach, we identify few empirical studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of affordability interventions in practice, especially the targeted approaches of recurring bill assistance and crisis relief. The literature on affordability interventions thus appears to lag considerably behind scholarship identifying and defining the problem of affordability. Accordingly, we suggest key questions throughout our review that need to be answered, thereby providing an agenda for future research on drinking water affordability solutions. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Value of Water

The use of tax increment financing (TIF) remains a popular, yet highly controversial, tool among policy makers in their efforts to promote economic development. This study conducts a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of Missouri’s TIF program, specifically in Kansas City and St. Louis, in creating economic opportunities. We build a time-series data set starting 1990 through 2012 of detailed employment levels, establishment counts, and sales at the census block-group level to run a set of difference-in-differences with matching estimates for the impact of TIF at the local level. Although we analyze the impact of TIF on a wide set of indicators and across various industry sectors, we find no conclusive evidence that the TIF program in either city has a causal impact on key economic development indicators.

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