04/09/18 Colloquium Series - Karen Clay: “The Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Resources on Economic Outcomes: Evidence from the United States 1936–2015”

This paper draws on new state-level panel datasets spanning 1936–2015 covering the three most valuable natural resources during the period—oil & gas, coal, and agricultural land—and a model of domestic Dutch disease to examine the short-run and long-run effects of resources on state economies. Using a flexible shift-share estimation approach, we find that different resources have different short-run effects in different time periods, across increases and decreases in resource employment, and across different outcomes. Using long differences, we find that resource endowments either have a very small positive effect or have no effect on longrun growth in per capita income. Long-run population growth has been an important margin of adjustment—states with larger coal and agricultural endowments per square mile experienced significantly slower population growth than states with smaller endowments per square mile.