Douglas H. Wrenn

Resident vs. Nonresident Employment Associated with Marcellus Shale Development

There is much debate about the employment effect of shale gas development, especially as it relates to extraction counties. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the jobs created are filled by nonresidents. We examine the impact shale gas development has on local employment in Pennsylvania using a data set that links workers to their personal residences. We find that activity in the Marcellus shale has had a modest positive impact on job growth. The impact is cut in half, however, when we use data for county residents only. Thus, traditional employment data may overestimate employment impacts from shale development.

Invisible water, visible impact: groundwater use and Indian agriculture under climate change

India is one of the world’s largest food producers, making the sustainability of its agricultural system of global significance. Groundwater irrigation underpins India’s agriculture, currently boosting crop production by enough to feed 170 million people. Groundwater overexploitation has led to drastic declines in groundwater levels, threatening to push this vital resource out of reach for millions of small-scale farmers who are the backbone of India’s food security. Historically, losing access to groundwater has decreased agricultural production and increased poverty. We take a multidisciplinary approach to assess climate change challenges facing India’s agricultural system, and to assess the effectiveness of large-scale water infrastructure projects designed to meet these challenges. We find that even in areas that experience climate change induced precipitation increases, expansion of irrigated agriculture will require increasing amounts of unsustainable groundwater. The large proposed national river linking project has limited capacity to alleviate groundwater stress. Thus, without intervention, poverty and food insecurity in rural India is likely to worsen.

Time is Money: An Empirical Examination of the Effects of Regulatory Delay on Residential Subdivision Development

Variation in regulatory costs over time and across different types of investment projects creates risk for developers who hold land. These so-called implicit costs, which arise as a result of regulatory delay in the land development process, are hypothesized to be potentially large, but empirical evidence of their influence on development outcomes is limited. Using a unique micro-level data set on parcel-level subdivision development that includes data on the timing of subdivision approvals, we test the effects of implicit costs that arise as a result of increased subdivision approval times on the timing and pattern of residential subdivision development. Consistent with theory, we find that these regulation-induced implicit costs reduce the probability of subdivision development on any given parcel. In addition, we find that systematic variation in regulation-induced implicit costs across space has reduced development in more heavily regulated urbanized areas intended for development and intensified development in less regulated exurban areas located farther away. The results provide a new explanation of scattered, low-density urban development as the result of optimal land development with multiple development options and heterogeneous regulatory costs.

Geographically and temporally weighted likelihood regression: Exploring the spatiotemporal determinants of land use change

Urban areas possess complex spatial configurations. These patterns are produced by cumulative changes in land use and land cover as human and natural environments are influenced by markets forces, policy, and changes in the natural landscape. To understand the mechanisms underlying these complex patterns, it is important to develop models that can capture the complexity of the underlying economic process. This includes spatiotemporal variation in the variables as well as spatiotemporal heterogeneity or non-stationarity in the model. The objective of this paper is to build on previous work in spatial nonparametric modeling and propose a spatiotemporal technique for nonlinear panel data models. Using a series of Monte Carlo experiments, we demonstrate how extending a geographically weighted likelihood regression (GWLR) model to account for temporal heterogeneity can improve the performance of the model when heterogeneity exists in the spatial and temporal dimension. We also show how the technique can be used in modeling real world land use changes by applying our proposed technique to a panel of historical subdivision development from an urbanizing county in the Baltimore/Towson Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Our results demonstrate that the method provides better performance than a standard parametric model. We also demonstrate how the spatiotemporal marginal effects from the model can be used to conduct policy analysis at multiple spatial and temporal scales, which is not possible using the standard global parameter estimates. Our proposed technique is simple to execute and can be implemented using any statistical software package.

Unconventional Shale Gas Development, Risk Perceptions, and Averting Behavior: Evidence from Bottled Water Purchases

Technological innovation has made extraction of natural gas from deep shale formations economically viable. While unconventional shale gas development is seen as an economic benefit, concerns have been raised about the environmental and health risks associated with the extraction process. We combine GIS data on unconventional shale gas development in Pennsylvania and Ohio with household data on bottled water purchases to assess the impact that perceived risks to drinking water from unconventional shale development have had on household well-being using a treatment effects design. In our preferred triple difference models with time-varying treatment effects, we find per household averting expenditure in 2010 ranges from

Not my problem: Growth spillovers from uncoordinated land use policy

10.74 in our full sample specification to

Resident Versus Non-Resident Employment Impacts Associated with Marcellus Shale Development

15.64 when omitting urban counties more likely to contain public water supplies. Converting the sample-average averting expenditure of

Price Based Land Use Policy and Development Density: Impacts on Urban Land Use

10.74 to an annual expenditure for the entire affected population implies an averting expenditure in Pennsylvania shale counties exceeding

The Impact of Water Access on Short-Term Migration in Rural India

19 million for the year 2010.

How do land use policies influence fragmentation? An econometric model of land development with spatial simulation

Land use policy is administered at the local level in the U.S. However, many of the benefits and costs have broader spatial impacts. Thus, a lack of coordination across local jurisdictions may lead to unintended spillovers. Using historical data from the Baltimore, Maryland metro, we examine the impact that an extensive zoning policy change in Baltimore County had on new housing supply in surrounding counties. Defining treatment and control locations in surrounding counties based on their adjacency to Baltimore County, we find that the change in zoning policy led to an increase in housing supply of 42%-97% in adjacent counties. In both spatial and temporal falsification tests, we fail to find evidence of a spillover effect suggesting that the increased development was likely the result of spillovers from uncoordinated policy.