Boom Town Business Dynamics

Abstract

The U.S. shale oil and gas boom provides a unique opportunity to study economic growth in a “boom town” environment, derive insights about labor market expansions more generally, and identify the causal effects of economic growth on specific margins of business adjustment. Creation of new establishments—separate from expansion of existing establishments—accounts for a disproportionate share of the multi-industry employment growth sparked by the shale boom, an intuitive but not inevitable empirical result that is consistent with models of firm dynamics. New firms, in particular, contribute nearly half of the cumulative employment growth resulting from the shale boom.