Over the past decade, the production of shale oil and gas significantly increased in the United States. This paper uniquely examines how this energy boom has affected regional crime rates throughout the United States. There is evidence that, as a result of the ongoing shale-energy boom, shale-rich counties experienced faster growth in rates of both property and violent crimes including rape, assault, murder, robbery, burglary, larceny and grand-theft auto. These results are particularly robust for rates of assault, and less so for other types of crimes. Examining the migratory behavior of convicted sex offenders indicates that boomtowns disproportionately attract convicted felons. Policy makers should anticipate these effects and invest in public infrastructure accordingly.

A surprising feature of resource-rich economies is slow growth. It is often argued that natural-resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures. This paper establishes an alternative explanationa slow-growing resource sector. A declining resource sector is disproportionally reected in resource-dependent countries but appears to have little aect on the rest of the economy. More generally, this paper illustrates the importance of considering industry composition in cross-country growth regressions.and Finance at the University of Wyoming, the Center for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies at the University of Oxford and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. All errors are my own.1 Without natural resources life itself is impossible. From birth to death, natural resources, transformed for human use, feed, clothe, shelter, and transport us. Upon them we depend for every material necessity, comfort, convenience, and protection in our lives. Without abundant resources prosperity is out of reach. Giord Pinchot.others have similarly tested for a resource curse (Papyrakis and Gerlagh, 2007;Williams, 2010;James and Aadland, 2010), this methodology has since been heavily criticized.Perhaps most notably, Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) question whether a negative correlation between resource dependence and growth implies an underlying story of causation.More specically, they argue that such cross-sectional regressions suer from problems of reverse causality. Because resource dependence is dened as resource earnings relative to income, poorer countries that may grow relatively slowly will tend to be more resource dependent than their wealthier, perhaps faster growing counterparts. Using a cross-section of 1 Sachs and Warner dene resource dependence as exports of primary products relative to total exports.Equation (1) is a simplied version of Sachs and Warner's main estimation equation which includes a variety of relevant controls.

An analytical framework predicts that, in response to an exogenous increase in resource-based government revenue, a benevolent government will partially substitute away from taxing income, increase spending and save. Fifty-one years of US-state level data are largely consistent with this theory. A baseline fixed effects model predicts that a $1.00 increase in resource revenue results in a $0.25 decrease in nonresource revenue, a $0.43 increase in spending and a $0.32 increase in savings. Instrumenting for resource revenue reveals that a positive revenue shock is largely saved and the rest is transferred back to residents in the form of lower nonresource tax rates. (JEL H71, H72, H76, Q38, R11)

Feyrer, Mansur, and Sacerdote (2017) estimates the spatial dispersion of the effects of the recent shale-energy boom by unconditionally regressing income and employment on energy production at various levels of geographic aggregation. However, producing counties tend to be located near each other and receive inward spillovers from neighboring production. This inflates the estimated effect of own-county production and spatial aggregation does not address this. We propose an alternative estimation strategy that accounts for these spillovers and identify reduced propagation effects. The proposed estimation strategy can be applied more generally to estimate the dispersion of multiple, simultaneously occurring economic shocks. (JEL E24, E32, J31, Q35, Q43, R11, R23)

Face coverings have been shown to slow the spread of COVID-19, yet their use is not universal and remains controversial in the United States. Designing effective nudges for widespread adoption is important when federal mandates are politically or legally infeasible. We report the results from a survey experiment in which subjects were exposed to one of three video messages from President Trump, and then indicated their preference for wearing a mask. In the first video, the President simply recited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. In the second, the President additionally emphasized that wearing a mask is optional. In the third video, the President added that he will not personally wear a mask. We find that exposure to presidential messages can increase the stated likelihood of wearing a mask—particularly among the President’s supporters. We also explore experiential effects of COVID-19, and find that people (especially supporters of the President) are more likely to support wearing a mask if they know someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. These results offer guidance to policy makers and practitioners interested in understanding the factors that influence viral risk mitigation strategies.

Environmental economics is now a long standing field of research; much has been learned on how environmental policy can use incentives to drive individual behaviors. Among the many examples, preference elicitation is the most discussed case in which incentives fail to accurately implement efficient behavior. Using this as our motivating example, herein we explore the cross-fertilization between environmental economics and social psychology . We first review how the lessons drawn from social psychology helped address the hypothetical bias issue. We then turn to the future of this process by focusing on how cheap talk scripts influence preference elicitation. Our experimental results shows CT scripts work through persuasion -i.e. changes mind, but poorly changes actions. In that sense, preference elicitation still lacks a way of making communication binding -i.e. a way to alter intrinsic motivation of subjects to behave truthfully. Keywords:Social psychology, Commitment, Persuasive communication, Preference elicitation JEL Classification: C9; H4; Q5 Résumé L'économie de l'environnement a depuis longtemps permis de mettre en évidence les moyens par lesquels les politiques publiques menées dans ce domaine peuvent s'appuyer sur les incitations pour orienter les comportements. Les méthodes de révélation des préférences restent cependant l'un des exemples les plus étudiés de défaillance des incitations. En s'appuyant sur cette illustration, cet article propose une synthèse des progrès réalisés en économie de l'environnement grâce à l'intégration des résultats issus de la psychologie sociale. La première partie de l'article propose une revue des méthodes issues de cette discipline et destinées à corriger le biais hypothétique. La seconde partie s'appuie sur une expérience en laboratoire pour évaluer la capacité des scripts de cheap talk à résoudre ce problème. Les comportements observés montrent que les scripts de cheap talk influencent les comportements par un effet de persuasion -i.e. agissent sur les intentions, mais n'affectent que faiblement les actions. En ce sens, les méthodes de révélation des préférences souffrent toujours du manque d'une méthode de communication engageante -i.e. permettant d'affecter la motivation intrinsèque des individus à révéler leurs préférences vraies.

International audienceHerein we explore whether a solemn oath can eliminate hypothetical bias in a voting referenda, a popular elicitation mechanism promoted in non-market valuation exercises for its incentive compatibility properties. First, we reject the null hypothesis that a hypothetical bias does not exist. Second, we observe that people who sign an oath are significantly less likely to vote for the public good in a hypothetical referenda. We complement this evidence with a self-reported measure of honesty which confirms that the oath increases truthfulness in answers. This result opens interesting avenues for improving the elicitation of preferences in the lab and beyond

No abstract