Three essays in resource economics

This dissertation consists of three essays concerning topics in resource economics, with a focus on the oil and gas and fishing sectors. Each essay quantifies the impacts of extraction on resource users or broader local populations with relevance for designing policies that balance effective management with damage mitigation. In the first essay, I investigate the effects of oil and gas wells on housing prices across the life cycle of the well. I combine detailed geospatial well production data with property characteristics and transactions in Pennsylvania to identify all wells of a given status within specified distances of each home. The effects of active wells on home prices reflect short-term production activity, while the effects of abandoned wells capture the long-term perceived environmental risk that can persist well after extraction ends. I also consider whether well-plugging, a growing focus of environmental policy, can reclaim those losses. I find inactive wells have a negative impact that does not diminish with distance, and plugging does not fully reverse these losses. In the second essay, we use the universe of individual-level catch and revenue data for Maritime Quebec to quantify the distributional impacts of an ITQ system. We look at fishers who differ in skill and outside options to address the efficiency-equity tradeoff that is a central concern in property-rights-based regulation. We implement a difference-in-differences approach to examine heterogeneous changes in income, effort, and exit along these distributions. We find the introduction of a particular ITQ system raised incomes without harming resource-dependent communities. In the third essay, I develop a predictive framework to identify Pennsylvania wells at highest risk of becoming orphaned. I first construct a naive, production-based classification and then estimate the probability that a well becomes orphaned within a fixed time horizon using a logit model. Age, declining production profiles, and small-operator ownership are consistent predictors of future orphaning. Together, these chapters show that while resource-based industries generate substantial economic value, they also create environmental risks, distributional consequences, and legacy liabilities that require policies to anticipate and internalize these costs.