I use oil and natural gas shale discoveries as a natural experiment to identify whether local access to finance matters for economic outcomes. Shale discoveries lead to large unexpected personal wealth windfalls, which result in an exogenous increase in local bank deposits and a positive local...

Shale oil and gas have become important areas of petroleum exploration and development. Successful shale oil and gas exploration depends on the accurate evaluation of sweet spots, which are the commercial targets. This paper proposes a comprehensive new method for sweet spot evaluation based on...