Effect of natural resource extraction on school performance: Evidence from Texas

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-02-25 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108308

Anita R. Schiller, Aurélie Slechten

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Abstract

This study examines the effects of oil and gas extraction activities on the educational outcomes of high school students in Texas, focusing on potential variations in these impacts among different demographic groups. We use school-level data from the Texas Academic Performance Reports between 2012–2020, with school performance measured by average scores on the American College Test (ACT). The primary variable of interest is the exposure to oil and gas activities, measured by changes in oil and gas revenues within each school district. The empirical approach controls for school characteristics, and student demographics. To address endogeneity concerns, we adopt an instrumental variable approach. Although the overall impact of oil and gas operations on average school ACT scores is not statistically significant, these activities do influence the relationship between student socioeconomic status and academic achievement. Specifically, for schools situated within districts that receive substantial oil and gas revenues, a small increase in the proportion of economically disadvantaged students is associated with a substantial decline in ACT scores.

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.