This paper describes the U.S. offshore oil and gas lease sales, conducted by the Department of the Interior since 1954. Several decision problems are discussed, including bidding for leases, the government's decision whether to accept the highest bid, the incidence and timing of exploratory...

This paper draws on a new state-level panel dataset and a model of domestic Dutch disease to examine the short-run and long-run effects of oil & natural gas, coal, and agricultural land endowments on state economies during 1936-2015. Using a flexible shift-share estimation approach, where the...

Do natural resources benefit producer economies, or is there a "Natural Resource Curse,"0 perhaps as the crowd-out of manufacturing productivity spillovers reduces long-term growth? We combine new data on oil and gas endowments with Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and gas...

We develop equilibrium models of an exhaustible resource market where both prices and extraction choices are determined endogenously. Our analysis highlights a role for adjustment costs in generating price dynamics that are consistent with observed oil and gas forward prices as well as with the...

An oil lease auction is the classic example motivating a common values model. However, formal testing for common values has been hindered by unobserved auction-level heterogeneity, which is likely to affect both participation in an auction and bidders' willingness to pay. We develop and apply an...

Oil and gas leases between mineral owners and extraction firms ubiquitously include royalty and primary term clauses. The royalty denotes the share of revenue that is paid to the mineral owner, and the primary term specifies the date by which the firm must complete a well, lest it lose the...

The benefits and costs of resource extraction are currently being hotly debated in the case of unconventional natural gas development (commonly known as "fracking"). Colorado provides a unique research environment to study the health impacts of conventional and unconventional forms of oil and...

In 2010, the Gulf Coast experienced the largest oil spill, the greatest mobilization of spill response resources, and the first Gulf-wide deepwater drilling moratorium in U.S. history. Taking advantage of the unexpected nature of the spill and drilling moratorium, I estimate the net effects of...

This paper compares outcomes from informally negotiated oil and gas leases to those awarded via centralized auction. We focus on Texas, where legislative decisions in the early twentieth century assigned thousands of proximate parcels to different mineral allocation mechanisms. We show that...