Regulating Agricultural Groundwater Contamination: A Comment

This comment argues that the model specification used by Wetzstein and Centner in a recent paper is not an appropriate representation of the problem of groundwater contamination from agricultural chemicals and that their conclusions regarding the efficiency of alternative liability rules are incorrect. In particular, the modified strict liability rule proposed by the authors will not lead to efficiency for what we argue is the correct model specification. Likewise, a pure negligence rule, which they argue is inefficient, is in fact efficient.