Who Needs a Fracking Education? The Educational Response to Low-Skill-Biased Technological Change

By Elizabeth U. Cascio, Ayushi Narayan. ILR Review, 2020

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors explore the educational response to fracking—a recent technological breakthrough in the oil and gas industry—by taking advantage of the timing of its diffusion and spatial variation in shale reserves. They show that fracking has significantly increased relative demand for less-educated male labor and increased high school dropout rates of male teens, both overall and relative to females. Estimates imply that, absent fracking, the teen male dropout rate would have been 1 percentage point lower over the period 2011–15 in the average labor market with shale reserves, implying an elasticity of school enrollment with respect to earnings below historical estimates. Fracking increased earnings and job opportunities more among young men than male teenagers, suggesting that educational decisions respond to improved earnings prospects, not just opportunity costs. Other explanations for the findings, such as changes in school quality, migration, or demographics, receive less empirical support.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab155dd5530e830f5be1b90170b86a2342fb18c4

Citations in the corpus

• The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing (2019, unknown): “Perhaps the most widely used is to compare areas over shale formations to areas without shale formations beneath them (see, e.g., Cascio and Narayan 2019; Fetzer 2014; Maniloff and Mastromonaco 2014; Weber 2012; Weinstein 2014).”
• Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction (2017, unknown): “The same model helps to explain the variation in estimated impacts on schooling of labor demand shocks outside of India (e.g. fracking jobs in the United States (Cascio and Narayan, 2015), export manufacturing jobs in Mexico (Atkin, 2016), and garment manufacturing jobs in Bangladesh (Heath and Moba”