This article suggests two methods for deriving a statistical verdict from a null finding, allowing economists to more confidently conclude when "not significant" can in fact be interpreted as "no substantive effect." The proposed methodology can be extended to a variety of empirical contexts...

The economic geography of the United States' energy landscape changed rapidly with domestic expansion of the natural gas sector. Recent work with smooth transition parameter models is extended to an establishment location model estimated using Poisson regression to test whether expansion of this...

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that firms do not in general respond equally to changes in prices and taxes in the setting of oil well drilling in the United States. Our key theoretical contribution is that in a multi-state model, a change in output price changes both the bene t...

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...

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...

Innovation-spurred growth in oil and gas production from shale formations led the U.S. to become the global leader in producing oil and natural gas. Because most shale is on private lands, drilling companies must access the resource through private lease contracts that provide a share of the...

Local shocks in oil and gas development may lead consumers to increase their spending. Using quarterly information on consumer debt and oil and gas activity between 2000 and 2016, I find that consumer debt increased at a peak of $840 per capita, equivalent to 1.7 percent of median household...

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...

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...