Abstract
AbstractResearchers and citizens alike question the long-term impacts of the shale oil boom on local communities. Studies have considered the boom’s effects on employment, income, mobility, and human capital acquisition. This research specifically builds on research considering shale effects on secondary schooling. Using county-level data from Texas, we investigate two questions: (1) Has the latest oil boom led to a reduction in local high school graduation? (2) Is this effect different for immigrants, a group potentially vulnerable to local wage effects? Findings indicate insignificant overall effects; however, local oil drilling increases immigrant high school dropout rates.
Highlights
The resource curse, though not without dissent, is a well-studied paradox
Has the latest oil boom led to a reduction in local high school graduation? Second, is this effect different for immigrants, a group that may be especially vulnerable to local wage effects? These research questions closely follow unanswered questions on the effects of busts that recent literature reviews suggest as an avenue for research (Fleming et al, 2015; Marchand and Weber, 2018)
With the Hausman test indicating significance of time-invariant fixed effects (FEs), the FE regression accounts for these characteristics to the extent to which they are time invariant, while the pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) regression controls for these characteristics by including other geographic controls including the shale play FE and the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural-Urban Continuum Codes
Summary
The resource curse, though not without dissent, is a well-studied paradox. The resource curse theorizes that areas abundant in natural resources exhibit poor economic outcomes, including low levels of personal income, educational attainment, and other measures of well-being. The advent of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling represented a significant shift in resource extraction for regions dependent on oil and natural gas and created new oil- and gas-dependent regions. The effects of these new extraction techniques renewed interest in the effects of drilling on economies and societies, with researchers studying effects on population (Measham and Fleming, 2014), employment (Tsvetkova and Partridge, 2016; Wrenn, Kelsey, and Jaenicke, 2015), income (Weinstein, 2014; Weinstein, Partridge, and Tsvetkova, 2018), education (Cascio and Narayan, 2015; Weber, 2014), and other topics
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