Assessing the Impacts of Urban Water-Use Restrictions at the District Level: Case Study of California’s Drought Mandate

Abstract

This paper estimates feasible water savings for a sample of nine urban water districts in California during the height of the 2012–2016 drought, just prior to the implementation of mandatory water-use reductions, using household production theory and stochastic frontier analysis. Estimates of feasible savings are compared to mandated reductions and actual reductions in each district. Although the mandated reductions were generally feasible, the results reported here show that they had asymmetric impacts across districts and tended to impose larger burdens on some disadvantaged groups.