IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/uwa/wpaper/14-15.html

Local Employment Impact from Competing Energy Sources: Shale Gas Versus Wind Generation in Texas

Author

Listed:
  • Peter R Hartley

    (Rice University and University of Western Australia)

  • Kenneth B Medlock III

    (Rice University)

  • Ted Temzelides

    (Rice University)

  • Xinya Zhang

    (Rice University)

Abstract

The rapid development of both wind power and of shale gas has been receiving significant attention both in the media and among policy makers. Since these are competing sources of electricity generation, it is informative to investigate their relative merits regarding job creation. We use a panel econometric model to estimate the historical job-creating performance of wind versus that of shale oil and gas. The model is estimated using monthly county level data from Texas from 2001 to 2011. Both first-difference and GMM methods show that shale-related activity has brought strong employment to Texas: 77 short-term jobs or 6.4 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs per well. Given that 5482 new directional/fractured wells were drilled in Texas in 2011, this implies that about 35000 FTE jobs were created in that year alone. We did not, however, find a corresponding impact on wages. Our estimations did not identify a non-negligible impact from the wind industry on either employment or wages.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter R Hartley & Kenneth B Medlock III & Ted Temzelides & Xinya Zhang, 2014. "Local Employment Impact from Competing Energy Sources: Shale Gas Versus Wind Generation in Texas," Economics Discussion / Working Papers 14-15, The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:uwa:wpaper:14-15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%20Discussion%20Papers/2014/14-15%20Local%20Employment%20Impact%20from%20Competing%20Energy%20Sources-Shale%20Gas%20versus%20Wind%20Generation%20in%20Texas.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q43 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Energy and the Macroeconomy
    • Q32 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation - - - Exhaustible Resources and Economic Development
    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure
    • J49 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Other
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uwa:wpaper:14-15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sam Tang (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deuwaau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.