Measuring Water Misallocation in California
This paper proposes and applies new methods to value water rights and assess misallocation across competing uses in California, the world’s fourth largest economy. The empirical strategy combines detailed microdata on farms, evapotranspiration, historical water rights, and the hydrological flow network in order to isolate sources of inefficiency within the hydrological network, assess distributional implications of water access under current property rights, and evaluate alternative mechanisms for water reallocation.
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Copy CitationWill Rafey, "Measuring Water Misallocation in California," NBER Working Paper 35176 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35176.Download Citation
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