TY - JOUR AU - Devoto,Florencia AU - Duflo,Esther AU - Dupas,Pascaline AU - Pariente,William AU - Pons,Vincent TI - Happiness on Tap: Piped Water Adoption in Urban Morocco JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 16933 PY - 2011 Y2 - April 2011 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16933 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16933.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Florencia Devoto Paris School of Economics 48 boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris France E-Mail: fdevoto@povertyactionlab.org Esther Duflo Department of Economics MIT, E52-252G 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617/258-7013 Fax: 617/253-6915 E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu Pascaline Dupas Department of Economics Stanford University 579 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305-6072 E-Mail: pdupas@stanford.edu William Pariente Institut de Recherche Économique et Sociale (IRES) Universite Catholique de Louvain Place Montesquieu 3, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium E-Mail: william.pariente@uclouvain.be Vincent Pons MIT Department of Economics 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 E-Mail: vpons@mit.edu AB - We study the demand for household water connections in urban Morocco, and the effect of such connections on household welfare. In the northern city of Tangiers, among homeowners without a private connection to the city’s water grid, a random subset was offered a simplified procedure to purchase a household connection on credit (at a zero percent interest rate). Take-up was high, at 69%. Because all households in our sample had access to the water grid through free public taps (often located fairly close to their homes), household connections did not lead to any improvement in the quality of the water households consumed; and despite significant increase in the quantity of water consumed, we find no change in the incidence of waterborne illnesses. Nevertheless, we find that households are willing to pay a substantial amount of money to have a private tap at home. Being connected generates important time gains, which are used for leisure and social activities, rather than productive activities. Because water is often a source of tension between households, household connections improve social integration and reduce conflict. Overall, within 6 months, self-reported well-being improved substantially among households in the treatment group, despite the financial cost of the connection. Our results suggest that facilitating access to credit for households to finance lump sum quality-of-life investments can significantly increase welfare, even if those investments do not result in income or health gains. ER -