In the U.S., natural gas pipeline transport has undergone a wave of deregulatory actions over the past several decades. The underlying motive has been the presumption that removing regulatory frictions would facilitate spot price arbitrage, helping to integrate prices across geographic locations...

Over the past five years the U.S. domestic crude benchmark, WTI, diverged considerably from its foreign counterpart, Brent. Some studies pointed to the crude oil export ban as the main culprit for this divergence, but pipeline capacity was also scarce during this time. To understand the drivers...

Thirty states have adopted renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) that set targets for renewable energy generation by mandating electric power utilities obtain a minimum percentage of their power from renewable sources. To date, there have been a number of studies that have consistently found that...

Thirty states have adopted renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) that set targets for renewable energy generation by mandating that electric power utilities obtain a minimum percentage of their power from renewable sources. Our synthetic control model finds that states with RPSs experience...

Understanding how changes to local labor market conditions impact household spending and savings decisions is a central topic in labor economics. Frequently, housing is the largest item on a household's balance sheet, and therefore making monthly mortgage payments is often both the largest...

Household wealth and liquidity are key factors in individuals' college enrollment choices. Therefore we investigate the impact of housing wealth, credit availability and financial distress on college enrollment decisions. We find that housing wealth is negatively related to enrollment in public...

Natural gas venting, flaring and leaking (VF&L) are closely intertwined environmental policy issues for U.S. shale oil and gas operations. In this paper, we lay out an agenda for researchers and policymakers. We describe why VF&L are closely related, both physically and in terms of policy. We...

We investigate effects of plausibly exogenous variation in the value of oil and natural gas production in local economies on self-employment in the United States. We find that self-employment is procyclical, i.e. self-employment increases during a business cycle expansion and is reduced during a...