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Working Paper
Asset Ownership, Windfalls, and Income: Evidence from Oil and Gas Royalties
How does local versus absentee ownership of natural resources?and their associated income?shape the relationship between extraction and local income? Theory and empirics on natural resources and the broader economy have focused heavily on labor markets, largely ignoring the economic implications of payments to resource owners. We study how local ownership of oil and gas rights shapes the local income effects of extraction. For the average U.S. county that experienced an increase in oil and gas production from 2000 to 2013, increased royalty income and its associated economic stimulus ...
Working Paper
Oil, Volatility and Institutions: Cross-Country Evidence from Major Oil Producers
This paper examines the long-run effects of oil revenue and its volatility on economic growth as well as the role of institutions in this relationship. We collect annual and monthly data on a sample of 17 major oil producers over the period 1961-2013, and use the standard panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach as well as its cross-sectionally augmented version (CS-ARDL) for estimation. Therefore, in contrast to the earlier literature on the resource curse, we take into account all three key features of the panel: dynamics, heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. Our ...
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 ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Resource Curse or Blessing? Sovereign Risk in Resource-Rich Emerging Economies
In this paper we document the stylized facts about the relationship between international oil price swings, sovereign risk and macroeconomic performance of oil-exporting economies. We show that even though being a bigger oil producer decreases sovereign risk?because it increases a country?s ability to repay?having more oil reserves increases sovereign risk by making autarky more attractive. We develop a small open economy model of sovereign risk with incomplete international financial markets, in which optimal oil extraction and sovereign default interact. We use the model to understand the ...
Working Paper
Response of Consumer Debt to Income Shocks: The Case of Energy Booms and Busts
Local shocks in oil and gas development may lead consumers to increase their spending. Using quarterly information on consumer debt and oil and gas activity between 2000 and 2016, I find that consumer debt increased at a peak of $840 per capita, equivalent to 1.7 percent of median household income in counties with shale endowment and increased drilling. Shocks to local wages via drilling revealed a marginal propensity to consume from debt of 0.45. Relative to areas with oil and gas development experience, the marginal propensity to consume was 70 percent larger in previously undeveloped ...
Working Paper
Response of Consumer Debt to Income Shocks: The Case of Energy Booms and Busts
This paper investigates how consumers respond to local income shocks as a result of booms and busts in oil and gas development. Oil and gas development generates potentially large streams of income via wages and salaries to workers and royalty income to mineral rights owners. Changes in development may lead consumers to increase their spending depending on their exposure to income shocks. Using quarterly information on consumer debt and oil and gas activity, I ?nd that consumer debt increased at a peak of $840 per capita in counties with shale endowment and increased drilling. Each well ...