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Journal Article
Update on Kansas and Missouri economies
Journal Article
The cycles of wind power development
Wind power, with its recent dramatic pace of development, has the potential to alter the energy landscape in some areas of the United States. Before 2006, wind power development was sparse. However, installed capacity doubled by 2008 and accelerated rapidly through 2012. Although wind power still accounts for a small share of the nation?s electricity supply, the recent surge in development has sparked discussion about wind?s potential as a significant source of long-term renewable energy.
Journal Article
Consumer Debt Is High, but Consumers Seem to Have Room to Run
Real consumer debt is now higher than its prior peak during the global financial crisis, driven in part by increases in credit card debt. Although the share of credit card debt transitioning into delinquency has risen, it remains below levels seen during the global financial crisis. Moreover, debt-to-income measures remain historically low, suggesting that consumers in aggregate may have more room to run up debt before experiencing further financial stress.
Journal Article
Identifying State-Level Recessions
Working Paper
How Centralized is U.S. Metropolitan Employment?
Centralized employment remains a benchmark stylization of metropolitan land use.To address its empirical relevance, we delineate "central employment zones" (CEZs)- central business districts together with nearby concentrated employment|for 183 metropolitan areas in 2000. To do so, we first subjectively classify which census tracts in a training sample of metros belong to their metro's CEZ and then use a learning algorithm to construct a function that predicts our judgment. {{p}} Applying this prediction function to the full cross section of metros estimates the probability we would judge ...
Working Paper
Effects of State Taxation on Investment: Evidence from the Oil Industry
We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that firms do not in general respond equally to changes in prices and taxes in the setting of oil well drilling in the United States. Our key theoretical contribution is that in a multi-state model, a change in output price changes both the benefit and opportunity cost of drilling, whereas a change in a state tax rate only changes the benefit of drilling in that state. Thus, a firm responds more to a change in tax than a change in price. Our econometric results support this theoretical prediction. We find that a one dollar per barrel increase in ...
Journal Article
The Reallocation of Energy-sector Workers After Oil Price Booms and Busts
Jason P. Brown and Andres Kodaka compare recent job losses in the mining sector with those that occurred during the Great Recession and find displaced workers had an easier time finding new jobs in 2015 than they did during the recession.
Working Paper
The Effect of the Conservation Reserve Program on Rural Economies: Deriving a Statistical Verdict from a Null Finding
This article suggests two methods for deriving a statistical verdict from a null finding,allowing economists to more confidently conclude when ?not significant" can in fact be interpreted as ?no substantive effect." The proposed methodology can be extended to a variety of empirical contexts where size and power matter. The example used to demonstrate the method is the Economic Research Service's 2004 Report to Congress that was charged with statistically identifying any unintended negative employment consequences of the Conservation Reserve Program (the Program). The report failed to ...
Journal Article
Production of natural gas from shale in local economies: a resource blessing or curse?
Innovations in the energy sector, particularly the extraction of natural gas from shale and tight gas formations using horizontal drilling and "fracking," have helped increase U.S. reserves of natural gas to an estimated 70 years' worth of supply. Some theories suggest such a boom leads to a local resource "blessing" in employment and a positive spillover into the local economy while others suggest a boom leads to a resource "curse" for industries not related to the energy sector. Brown examines county-level labor market conditions in the central United States and finds a modest ...
Working Paper
Capturing rents from natural resource abundance: private royalties from U.S. onshore oil and gas production
Innovation-spurred growth in oil and gas production from shale formations led the U.S. to become the global leader in producing oil and natural gas. Because most shale is on private lands, drilling companies must access the resource through private lease contracts that provide a share of the value of production ? a royalty ? to mineral owners. We investigate the competitiveness of leasing markets by estimating how much mineral owners capture geologically-driven advantages in well productivity through a higher royalty rate. We estimate that the six major shale plays generated $39 billion in ...