Author: Gordon Ji
Degree: Ph.D. in Economics
Advisor: Dr. Eugenio Miravete
Institution: University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2025-2026
As climate change amplifies more volatile weather patterns, water utilities face increasing difficulty in simultaneously ensuring revenue feasibility, promoting water conservation, and protecting low-income consumers. This paper tests and concludes that price alone cannot achieve these competing policy goals under different weather patterns. Using granular household data from Austin, TX, and a structural demand model enhanced with satellite imagery-derived vegetation index, I find that because high-water users exist across all income levels, traditional tiered pricing doesn’t work as intended. Furthermore, higher-income households—who are both weather-sensitive and surprisingly price-elastic—complicate the utility’s ability to achieve its distributional objectives while meeting the conservation target. When high-demand conditions (e.g., drought) make conservation measures necessary, low-income families experience an average welfare loss of $74 per month. This highlights the necessity of complementary policies to achieve distributional goals when demand increases. For example, a program encouraging households to convert 30\% of their lawns to water-saving landscapes (zeroscaping/xeriscaping) could generate approximately $70 per month in welfare for the lowest-income families, nearly offsetting the financial burden imposed by conservation policies during droughts.
├── pre_analysis/ # Data cleaning, GIS data, and NDVI
├── demand/ # Demand Estimation
├── price_elasticity/ # Code to generate price elasticity
├── NDVI_categorization/ # Code to generate 3DPD results related to NDVI based segmentation
├── preliminary_intuition/ # Code related to constructing preliminary intuition of the optimal Ramsey price
├── counterfactual_temp/ # Counterfactual analysis that's not been used
├── counterfactual_ramsey/ # Counterfactual analysis of Ramsey Pricing Model
├── other_app_info/ # Folders contain other application info
├── gordonji_jmp_2026.pdf # Job Market Paper (Last edited June 2025)
└── README.md # Project overview (this file)
This repository accompanies my dissertation research on the intersection of utility pricing, climate variability, and economic welfare. It includes:
The data comes from Austin Water’s monthly transaction records.
Due to privacy constraints, raw data are not publicly included.
This project is licensed under the MIT License – see the LICENSE file for details.
If you have questions or want to collaborate, feel free to reach out:
📧 [guozhenj@utexas.edu], [gordonjgz@gmail.com]