We estimate the effect of positive and negative oil shocks on suicide. Using restricted-use, U.S. state-level mortality data, we find that negative shocks increase suicide risk and that positive ones have little effect. Baseline estimates indicate that from 2015 to 2020, the oil bust raised the average suicide rate in the most oil-rich states by roughly 13%. Exploring sources of heterogeneity, effects are largely driven by men and people without college degrees. Results are robust to various modeling decisions and assumptions and are not easily explained by compositional changes. Implications are discussed, especially as they relate to the clean-energy transition and the “resource curse.”

State and locally-administered cash transfers have received growing interest in recent years as a means to address economic strain and inequality in the United States. A key consideration is whether new residents would be drawn to jurisdictions with cash transfers. We develop an online survey experiment to explore people’s relative preference for—and willingness to move in order to receive—cash transfers. Across three different experimental protocols, including one that leverages Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend Program (the only large-scale universal cash-transfer program currently employed in the United States), we find that state-administered cash transfers have broad support and are generally preferred to both tax cuts or additional public spending. Examining mechanisms, people tend to prefer cash transfers because they are perceived to offer lump-sum rewards, as opposed to incremental ones. Considered jointly with existing estimates of the tax-elasticity of interstate migration, our results suggest that state-administered cash-transfer programs implemented in U.S. would likely attract new residents.

We estimate the effect of unconditional cash transfers on voter turnout, leveraging a large‐scale natural experiment, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) program, which has provided residents with a check of varying size 1 month before election day since 1982. We find that larger transfers cause people to vote, especially in gubernatorial elections in which a 10% increase in cash ($190) causes a 1.4 percentage point increase in turnout. Effects are concentrated among the young and poor. Survey data suggests the mechanism is reduced voter apathy. Implications are discussed.

Charitable organizations often rely on multi-step solicitation processes in which potential donors are first asked whether they wish to donate, with information about specific causes or donation details disclosed later in the process. We study how the timing of information disclosure and perceived commitment affect donation decisions, and we test these mechanisms using controlled experiments. In Experiment 1, we find that separating the decision to donate from information about specific causes significantly reduces the probability of accepting a fixed donation request relative to a one-step ask. Providing information about transaction costs or emphasizing non-commitment does not increase giving, whereas eliminating uncertainty about causes restores donation rates to the one-step level. A follow-up Experiment 2 conducted in a conventional fundraising environment with a single, well-known charity and flexible donation amounts yields similar results: one-step solicitations generate more donations than two-step solicitations. The findings demonstrate that the sequencing of information within a solicitation, independent of the information itself, plays a central role in shaping charitable-giving behavior.

In 2024, Resources Policy reaches its 50th anniversary as a journal. Fifty years leading the field of mineral and fossil fuel policies and economic research worldwide. Considering this special milestone, we provide a forward-looking view in this paper, highlighting seven areas we believe are critical for robust research that Resources Policy should publish in the future. Leveraging our research expertise and knowledge with the journal, these seven areas of future research include implications of post-mining and energy transitions, the dark side of critical minerals, the increasing substitution of local labour by alternative inputs, the role of the resource curse in resilience considerations, the cleaner production role of mining, macroeconomic frameworks, and the future of mining beyond mines (deep-sea and space mining). We believe more research is needed in these seven research areas, which can enhance our understanding of critical aspects, reduce uncertainty, and provide novel ways to address societal, environmental, economic and policy challenges related to the extraction and use of minerals and fossil fuels.

What determines demand for government accountability following the disclosure of political misconduct? Existing literature suggests that political intentions and taxation may both play a role, but direct evidence is scarce. We test these theories using an online survey experiment administered in the United States in which subjects were randomly assigned to one of five informational treatments describing the corrupt or incompetent use of income tax or oil revenue. We find that intentions matter a great deal; holding losses constant, corruption leads to greater demand for accountability than incompetence. Among high-income earners, the corrupt misuse of income-tax revenue generally leads to more demand for accountability than that of oil-tax revenue. Considered jointly, our results help to explain patterns of civic engagement in the United States and offer implications for the optimal structure of public finance.

Sudden shocks to labor demand have sometimes been shown to increase local crime rates. We build on this literature by estimating the causal effect of labor-intensive seasonal agricultural activity on crime. We analyze a unique data set that describes criminal activity and fruit, vegetable, and horticultural (FVH) employment by month and U.S. county from 1990 to 2016. We find that the FVH labor share is associated with reduced property and violent crime rates, and possibly the number of property crimes committed within county years. Examining heterogeneities based on ethnicity, labor-intensive FVH activity decreases the rate of non-Hispanic arrests and victimization, and increases the number of Hispanic arrests and victims (consistent with rising local Hispanic populations). Taken together, results are broadly consistent with the idea that agricultural harvest of labor-intensive crops enhances local labor market opportunities that reduce incentives to commit crimes. Results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications that address the inherent challenges associated with measuring seasonal agricultural labor.

Are natural resources a curse or a blessing? The answer may depend on how natural wealth is managed. By transforming a temporary windfall into a permanent stock in the form of a sovereign wealth fund, resource-rich economies can avoid volatility and Dutch disease effects, save for future generations, and invest locally. We review the theory behind these resource funds and explore the empirical evidence for their success. Our review is complemented by case studies that highlight some of the more nuanced features, behavior, and effects of resource funds. While the theoretical research highlights the situational success of funds, empirical examinations are minimal. We discuss possible reasons for this gap in the literature and, in doing so, highlight some of the challenges associated with empirical research in this area and discuss possible paths forward.

We examine how large and localized resource discoveries affect long-run population growth in the United States, and examine how these shocks interact with pre-existing geographic properties of the discovery site. Using a dynamic event study analysis and developing novel, geographically delineated measures of both amenity value and geographic isolation, we find that resource discoveries cause population to grow both in the short and long-run (e.g., fifty years). However, this effect is largely driven by discoveries in unfavorable locations that might struggle to grow in the absence of a resource discovery. More generally, this paper highlights the importance of considering heterogeneous effects of resource shocks and yields insights into the observed spatial distribution of people in the United States.

Are natural resources a curse or a blessing? The answer may depend on how natural wealth is managed. By transforming a temporary windfall into a permanent stock in the form of a sovereign wealth fund, resource-rich states can avoid volatility and Dutch Disease effects, save for future generations, and invest locally. Herein we review the theory behind these resource funds, and explore the empirical evidence of their success. Our review is complemented by case studies that highlight some of the more nuanced features, behavior, and effects of resource funds. While the theoretical work highlights prescribing funds as remedies is situational, existing empirical work to complement these prescriptions is minimal. We discuss possible reasons for this, and in doing so highlight some of the challenges associated with empirical research in this area and discuss possible paths forward.

We partnered with Alaska’s Pick.Click.Give. programme to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to examine two of the main motivations for charitable giving: concerns for the benefits to self (impure altruism or ‘warm glow’) or concerns for the benefits to others (pure altruism). Our empirical results highlight the relative importance of appeals to self: individuals who received such an appeal were 6.6% more likely to give and gave 23% more than counterparts in the control group. Yet, a message that instead appealed to recipient benefits (motivated by altruism) had no statistically significant effect on average donations relative to the control group. We also find evidence of long-run effects of warm-glow appeals in the subsequent year. Our results have import for theoreticians and empiricists interested in modelling charitable giving as well as practitioners and policymakers.

Face coverings have been shown to slow the spread of COVID-19, yet their use is not universal and remains controversial in the United States. Designing effective nudges for widespread adoption is important when federal mandates are politically or legally infeasible. We report the results from a survey experiment in which subjects were exposed to one of three video messages from President Trump, and then indicated their preference for wearing a mask. In the first video, the President simply recited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. In the second, the President additionally emphasized that wearing a mask is optional. In the third video, the President added that he will not personally wear a mask. We find that exposure to presidential messages can increase the stated likelihood of wearing a mask-particularly among the President's supporters. We also explore experiential effects of COVID-19, and find that people (especially supporters of the President) are more likely to support wearing a mask if they know someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. These results offer guidance to policy makers and practitioners interested in understanding the factors that influence viral risk mitigation strategies.

Does oil corrupt? We test this theory using forty years of U.S. state-level data measuring corruption as both convictions of corruption and the frequency that words like “corrupt”, “fraud”, and “bribe”—and their iterations—appear in newspapers. We find that oil-rich U.S. states experience more corruption than their oil-poor counterparts, but only during periods of high oil prices, suggesting a causal relationship. Results are robust to a variety of modeling assumptions and specifications. Implications and mechanisms are discussed.

This study explores whether an oath to honesty can reduce both shirking and lying among crowd-sourced internet workers. Using a classic coin-flip experiment, we first confirm that a substantial majority of Mechanical Turk workers both shirk and lie when reporting the number of heads flipped. We then demonstrate that lying can be reduced by first asking each worker to swear voluntarily on his or her honor to tell the truth in subsequent economic decisions. Even in this online, purely anonymous environment, the oath significantly reduced the percent of subjects telling "big" lies (by roughly 27%), but did not affect shirking. We also explore whether a truth-telling oath can be used as a screening device if implemented after decisions have been made. Conditional on flipping response, MTurk shirkers and workers who lied were significantly less likely to agree to an ex-post honesty oath. Our results suggest oaths may help elicit more truthful behavior, even in online crowd-sourced environments.

Oil booms have been shown to increase local employment and wages. But these effects reflect the aggregated experience of residents, commuters, and recent migrants alike. This paper takes advantage of a unique data set that identifies a rich set of labor market outcomes by place of residence, rather than by place of work. Exploiting this feature of the data, we examine the effect of a major oil boom on employment and wage outcomes in the North Slope Borough of Alaska. This analysis is juxtaposed with a more conventional one that uses place-of-work data collected from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Using the Synthetic Control Method, we find that the oil boom of the late 2000s significantly increased non-residential employment. While the boom caused residential employment to shift from the public to the private sector, total residential employment was unaffected. There is weak evidence that residential wages increased in response to the boom. These results are important as drilling decisions are often negotiated locally by interest groups that might be less concerned with general equilibrium effects.

Creation of empirical knowledge in economics has taken a dramatic turn in the past few decades. One feature of the new research landscape is the nature and extent to which scholars generate data. Today, in nearly every field the experimental approach plays an increasingly crucial role in testing theories and informing organizational decisions. Whereas there is much to appreciate about this revolution, recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that an important component of Fischer (1935)u0027s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. Indeed, while the importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, current incentives are not sufficient to encourage replications from the individual researcheru0027s perspective. We propose a novel mechanism that promotes replications by leveraging mutually beneficial gains between scholars and editors. We develop a model capturing the trade-offs involved in seeking independent replications before submission of a paper to journals. We showcase our method via an investigation of the effects of Knightian uncertainty on cooperation rates in public goods games, a pervasive and yet largely unexplored feature in the literature.

Oil-dependent countries suffer from bad institutions. While some believe oil to be the culprit, others have argued that institution-weak economies are poor and resource dependent as a result. This concern previously motivated examinations of resource abundance (e.g., resource production or deposits) that tend to yield different results. But this does not confirm endogeneity bias because resource abundance may not accurately capture the relative importance of natural resources to an economy. In this paper, it is demonstrated that institutional quality is indeed correlated with GDP, and that this fully explains the observed negative relationship between institutional quality and energy dependence. This finding offers broad implications that reach beyond the resource-development literature and speaks generally to the practice of scaling explanatory variables by GDP.