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)