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Journal Article
The response of employment to changes in oil and gas exploration and drilling
Oil prices declined significantly during the summer of 2014, leading to a subsequent decline in energy exploration and drilling. By the end of April 2015, rig counts were down 49 percent. In the past, these declines have disproportionately affected the economies of oil- and gas-producing states, decreasing statewide employment and inducing ?regional recessions.?
Working Paper
Rising Market Concentration and the Decline of Food Price Shock Pass-Through to Core Inflation
Using a vector autoregression that allows for time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility, we show that U.S. core inflation became 75 percent less responsive to shocks in food prices since the late 1970s. The decline in the pass-through of food price shocks to inflation is a result of a decline in both volatility and the persistence of food price changes in inflation. This decline in pass-through coincides with a period of increasing concentration in the food supply chain, especially among U.S. grocery retailers and distributors. We find that 60 percent of the variation in pass-through ...
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 ...
Journal Article
How the Pandemic Influenced Trends in Domestic Migration across U.S. Urban Areas
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, net domestic migration in the United States was generally increasing in smaller urban areas while declining in the largest urban areas; as people sought to mitigate exposure to COVID-19 and avoid stricter lockdown measures, the pandemic may have accelerated this trend. Changes in domestic migration trends may influence the longer-term growth prospects of places, but investigating recent trends in domestic migration can be challenging because data from official government sources are released with a long lag.Jason P. Brown and Colton Tousey overcome this lag by ...
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
Death of Coal and Breath of Life: The Effect of Power Plant Closure on Local Air Quality
The number of U.S. coal-fired power plants declined by nearly 250 between 2001 and 2018. Given that burning coal generates large amounts of particulate matter, which is known to have adverse health effects, the closure of a coal-fired power plant should improve local air quality. Using spatial panel data from air quality monitor stations and coal-fired power plants, we estimate the relationship between plant closure and local air quality. We find that on average, the levels of particulate matter within 25 and 50 mile buffers around air quality monitors declined between 7 and 14 percent with ...
Working Paper
Economic Benefits and Social Costs of Legalizing Recreational Marijuana
We analyze the effects of legalizing recreational marijuana on state economic and social outcomes (2000–20) using difference-in-differences estimation robust to staggered timing and heterogeneity of treatment. We find moderate economic gains accompanied by some social costs. Post-legalization, average state income grew by 3 percent, house prices by 6 percent, and population by 2 percent. However, substance use disorders, chronic homelessness, and arrests increased by 17, 35, and 13 percent, respectively. Although some of our estimates are noisy, our findings suggest that the economic ...
Working Paper
The Missing Tail Risk in Option Prices
This paper contributes to the literature on deviations from rational expectations in financial markets and to the literature on evaluating density forecasts. We first develop a novel statistic to evaluate the overall accuracy of distributional forecasts, and find two methods that yield accurate distributional forecasts. We then propose another statistic to examine the relative accuracy over the entire distribution range. Our results indicate more oil price realizations in the left tail than predicted. We argue that this finding points to a persistent behavioral forecasting bias and a ...
Working Paper
Rural wealth creation and emerging energy industries: lease and royalty payments to farm households and businesses
New technologies for accessing energy resources, changes in global energy markets, and government policies have encouraged growth in the natural gas and wind industries in the 2000s. The growth has offered new opportunities for wealth creation in many rural areas. At a local level, households who own land or mineral rights can benefit from energy development through lease and royalty payments. Using nationally-representative data on U.S. farms from 2011, we assess the consumption, investment, and wealth implications of the $2.3 billion in lease and royalty payments that energy companies paid ...