The shale oil and gas boom in the U.S. provides a unique opportunity to study economic growth in a "boom town" environment, to derive insights about economic expansions more generally, and to obtain clean identification of the causal effects of economic growth on specific margins of business...

We investigate effects of plausibly exogenous variation in the value of oil and natural gas production in local economies on self-employment in the United States. We find that self-employment is procyclical, i.e. self-employment increases during a business cycle expansion and is reduced during a...

Thirty states have adopted renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) that set targets for renewable energy generation by mandating that electric power utilities obtain a minimum percentage of their power from renewable sources. Our synthetic control model finds that states with RPSs experience...

Understanding how changes to local labor market conditions impact household spending and savings decisions is a central topic in labor economics. Frequently, housing is the largest item on a household's balance sheet, and therefore making monthly mortgage payments is often both the largest...

Over the past five years the U.S. domestic crude benchmark, WTI, diverged considerably from its foreign counterpart, Brent. Some studies pointed to the crude oil export ban as the main culprit for this divergence, but pipeline capacity was also scarce during this time. To understand the drivers...

We examine the relationship between fossil fuel (FF) endowments and economic convergence. Countries with plausibly exogenous FF endowments show patterns of convergence, as indicated by standard convergence tests. By contrast, we fi nd no evidence of convergence among countries without FF...

State-regulated investor-owned utilities serve over 70 percent of electricity to final end-use retail consumers in the U.S. Prior to the 1990s, all states used a “cost of service (COS)” regulation regime in which investor-owned utilities were allowed to recover prudently incurred costs plus...