Research Library

Media stories have raised concerns about Florida’s expansion of advanced trauma centers, with newly designated centers charging high trauma activation fees for relatively minor injuries, and Texas has experienced similar expansion in the last decade. In a new working paper, Chair in Health Economics Vivian Ho and her co-authors study the association between trauma center upgrades and patient outcomes — examining Texas commercial claims to track changes in spending, mortality, and readmissions of trauma patients

How can the U.S. government help the recovery of the post-transition Venezuelan oil and gas sector? The authors offer key recommendations.

The authors identify bottlenecks in the oil the oil and gas value chain that physically cause upstream flaring at the well; analyze the economic reasons for flaring, market distortions that could exacerbate it, and the cost to society of flaring, then lay out an agenda for researchers and policymakers.

Despite its massive geological endowment and receiving what could be considered the largest windfall in its economic history, Venezuela entered 2020 in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic and turbulence in oil markets represent the latest in a string of problems that expose the country’s vulnerability.

A working paper with appendix by Center for Energy Studies nonresident scholar Mark Agerton.

Venezuela, which has one of the largest hydrocarbon endowments in the world, offers a striking case study on the resource curse, write Francisco Monaldi, Igor Hernández and José La Rosa. This working paper is part of a series titled “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Resource-Rich Regions.”

The authors investigate two plausible causes for the significant price discount of U.S. crudes during the U.S. “shale boom” and evaluate how much each mattered.

This paper examines 16 Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, and Spanish LNG import price series to illustrate how allowing for structural breaks in the LNG-oil relationship reveals cointegration in pricing.

While much has been made in recent years about the increasing liquidity and size of a spot market for liquefied natural gas, most LNG is still sold under confidential, long-term contracts. In fact, in 2013, according to data from the International Group of Liquefied Natural Gas Importers, 73 percent of all LNG trades took place under long-term contracts, which are especially prevalent in Asian markets. Despite the fact that this constitutes an enormous trade, there is very little transparency about how prices are specified, what actual transaction prices are or when pricing terms change. Using publicly available customs data on 16 different trade routes of the largest importers of LNG, graduate fellow Mark Agerton applies econometric techniques to estimate and characterize the empirical relationship between LNG import prices and crude oil prices.

Technological progress in the exploration and production of oil and gas during the 2000s has led to a boom in upstream investment and has increased the domestic supply of fossil fuels. It is unknown, however, how many jobs this boom has created. Using time-series methods at the national level and dynamic panel methods at the state level to understand how the increase in exploration and production activity has impacted employment, this paper finds robust statistical support for the hypothesis that changes in drilling for oil and gas as captured by rig counts do, in fact, have an economically meaningful and positive impact on employment.