From 2002 to 2004, New York City ceased collecting residential glass and plastic recycling due to city budgetary pressure. We use data on recycling rates in New York City, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in a difference-in-differences (DID) research design to determine whether this exogenous pause weakened previously formed recycling habits. Despite a 50% decline in the overall recycling rate in 2003, by 2005 the overall recycling rate had fully recovered. Our results suggest that recycling habits are persistent in the short term and that the loss of previously established recycling habits and skills are not an unintended harm of pausing a recycling program. We show that these results hold in the standard DID approach, as well as a synthetic DID approach modified to estimate time-disaggregated treatment effects separately, which eliminates pre-trends and improves the precision of our estimates.

中文翻译：

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回收中的习惯和技能保留

2002年至2004年，由于城市预算压力，纽约市停止收集住宅玻璃和塑料回收。我们在双重差分（DID）研究设计中使用纽约市、新泽西州和马萨诸塞州的回收率数据来确定这种外源性暂停是否削弱了之前形成的回收习惯。尽管2003年总体回收率下降了50%，但到2005年总体回收率已完全恢复。我们的研究结果表明，回收习惯在短期内会持续存在，并且先前建立的回收习惯和技能的丧失并不是暂停回收计划的意外伤害。我们表明，这些结果适用于标准 DID 方法，以及经过修改以单独估计按时间分类的治疗效果的合成 DID 方法，这消除了预先趋势并提高了我们估计的精度。