States oversee most regulation of oil and gas extraction in the United States. When relying on regulation, state oil and gas agencies may be susceptible to capture by firms developing resources. This may be particularly problematic during booms of resource development when information asymmetries are largest and existing regulations risk becoming obsolete. If regulators are captured, they may take actions that serve concentrated private interests in preference to the public interests they are charged with upholding. I develop and test hypotheses that oil and gas regulators are captured. The primary empirical tests use data from state regulation in North Dakota to prevent resource waste by restricting natural gas flaring. The empirical results are consistent with the theory of regulatory capture, providing empirical evidence that captured regulators serve well-organized specific interests in preference to diffuse general interests. These results provide novel granular evidence of the mechanisms for regulatory capture by showing differences in regulatory responses across firms and locations. This detailed evidence has implications for the design of regulations and reliance on regulatory interventions to protect the public interest.

U.S. wind generation capacity has grown by a factor of nearly 50 times in the past 20 years; now nearly a third of wind capacity is 10 years old or older. This ageing of this fleet affects the productivity of existing investments and raises the stakes for replacing these assets through repowering. Focusing on the Texas wind power fleet to examine declining productivity over time, and how those changes factor into replacement and retirement decisions, we corroborate earlier decline findings but observe a slower rate of repowering than in other settings. We then explore repowering decisions and find evidence that technological change has favored relatively unproductive sites, in contrast to the previous literature on this topic. We explore the policy implications of our findings, in particular the desirability and feasibility of using policy tools to promote more repowering.

American Journal of Agricultural EconomicsVolume 103, Issue 5 p. 1926-1927 Book Review Out of the Shadows: The New Merchants of Grain. by Jonathan Kingsman, 2019, ISBN 978- 1704267821 Timothy Fitzgerald, Corresponding Author Timothy Fitzgerald timothy.fitzgerald@ttu.edu Texas Tech UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Timothy Fitzgerald, Corresponding Author Timothy Fitzgerald timothy.fitzgerald@ttu.edu Texas Tech UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12232Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume103, Issue5October 2021Pages 1926-1927 RelatedInformation

Hydraulic fracturing (HF) has transformed the North American oil and gas industry, leading to increased consumer surplus and reduced carbon emissions. While HF may have similar potential for the developing world, adoption has been limited to date, plausibly because of perceptions of potential local costs and the need to develop technical proficiency. We empirically evaluate the incremental contribution of HF in the United States. We find considerable evidence of differences in application and productivity across operating firms and vertical pairings of firms, suggesting intellectual property and learning by doing may both play important roles. At the same time, secrecy regarding the chemical composition of fluids used in HF is a potential deterrent to its application for fear of local costs. Developing countries must accommodate these characteristics if adoption of HF is to help meet energy demands and achieve climate policy goals.

The land-use impacts of the rapid expansion of U.S. oil and gas infrastructure since the early 2000s are a focus of local, state, and federal policymakers. Agriculture is the dominant land use in many areas with active energy development. Prior studies find that energy development displaces agriculture and assume that this effect is both permanent and homogeneous. We take a novel approach, analyzing landowners' capacity to both anticipate displaced production prior to the drilling of oil and gas wells, and reclaim some land once wells are in production. Using North Dakota's Bakken Shale as a case study, we merge agricultural land-use data from 2006 to 2014 with locations and drilling dates of oil and gas wells. We then use panel fixed-effects models to estimate the spatially- and intertemporally-heterogeneous effects of additional wells on agricultural land. We find that drilling is associated with reduced surrounding crop cover and increased fallow acreage. Importantly, the duration of these effects differs across agricultural land covers, and effects are in some cases temporary. Our analysis suggests that overlooking dynamic land use impacts may overestimate the cumulative net impact of oil and gas development on agricultural land uses by up to a factor of two.

We estimate possible effects of Joe Biden’s tax and regulatory agenda. We find that transportation and electricity will require more inputs to produce the same outputs due to ambitious plans to further cut the nation’s carbon emissions, resulting in one or two percent less total factor productivity nationally. Second, we find that proposed changes to regulation as well as to the ACA increase labor wedges. Third, Biden’s agenda increases average marginal tax rates on capital income. Assuming that the supply of capital is elastic in the long run to its after-tax return and that the substitution effect of wages on labor supply is nontrivial, we conclude that, in the long run, Biden’s full agenda reduces full-time equivalent employment per person by about 3 percent, the capital stock per person by about 15 percent, real GDP per capita by more than 8 percent, and real consumption per household by about 7 percent.

Climate and trade policy present serious contemporary challenges for all nations. Developed market economies are struggling with trade policy in the modern era of globalization, and the resulting realignments are straining the post-war international economic order. National emissions pledges under the Paris Agreement appear at present to fall far short of achieving the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cuts that science suggests are needed to remain in a < 2 °C world. Merging climate and trade policy could provide developed economies a strategy for limiting global emissions while protecting and promoting their economic competitiveness. Since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, border carbon adjustments (BCAs) that would help protect domestic energy-intensive industry and prevent leakage have been discussed as a mechanism to make unilateral climate mitigation more politically attractive. Especially if implemented non-cooperatively, BCAs open the backdoor to protectionism and retaliation and potentially allow nations to retreat behind static barriers. Developments in international trade policy make this alternative to traditional climate diplomacy more viable today than previously and also increase the chance of climate protectionism. We propose an alternative policy framework-a cooperative sectoral tariff reduction (CSTR)-that would help provide dynamic incentives to improve performance, reduce the chance of BCAs being coopted for protectionist purposes, and create the foundation of a carbon club.

Utilizing a unique time series of cross-sectional surveys, we analyse the labour market for professional landman services to establish the factors affecting compensation during a recent period that substantially increased demand. Land services are an important subsector of the energy industry, especially for oil and gas exploration and production, which has been stimulated by technological improvements that facilitate economic extraction of unconventional resources. That led to an increase in oil and gas leasing activity and a resultant increase in demand for land services. We assess factors affecting compensation across several relevant margins. An influx of entrants into the profession has disrupted historic compensation patterns; entry appears to have been greatest in regions of the United States most affected by unconventional resource development. Some landmen are independent contractors while others are company employees. We find mixed results for professional certifications across contract types and gender, using instrumental variables to account for contractual choice. Abberivation: AAPL: American Association of Professional Landmen; RPL: registered professional landman; CPL: certified professional landman; PLM: professional land manager

An often overlooked aspect of the Jones Act is its environmental effects. By raising the cost of waterborne transportation, the law encourages the use of alternative forms of transport such as trucks and rail. These alternative means of moving goods generate more greenhouse gases and emit pollutants that are in many ways more harmful than those emitted by waterborne transport. Moreover, the Jones Act encourages the use of older, less‐​efficient vessels. Thus, the Jones Act contributes to an environment that is more despoiled than would otherwise be the case in the law’s absence. This paper presents a detailed examination of the potential environmental gains that could be realized from reform or repeal of the law. It estimates that the environmental benefits accruing from the law’s repeal, through expanded use of waterborne transport as well as newer, more efficient vessels, would exceed $8 billion per year. Such gains are rarely estimated, if they are even considered. To mitigate the adverse effects that transportation has on the environment, policymakers should acknowledge that the Jones Act encourages businesses to use less environmentally friendly forms of transport. Repeal of the Jones Act—or even a more limited set of reforms—would both promote economic growth and a cleaner environment.

We study how subsurface ownership shapes the income effects of oil and gas extraction. For the average US county with growth in extraction from 2000 to 2014, we find that royalty income and its multiplier effect accounted for 70% of the total income gain, with each royalty dollar generating an additional 49 cents of local income. A county where residents own the subsurface captured 28 cents more of each dollar in production than one with absentee ownership. Nationally, oil and gas production increased US personal income in 2014 by $67 billion (0.5%) more than if all royalties accrued abroad. Areas with the same resource abundance can therefore experience contrasting economic outcomes because of differences in ownership.