IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/enejou/v40y2019i5p169-193.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Impacts of Lower Natural Gas Prices on Jobs in the U.S. Manufacturing Sector

Author

Listed:
  • Wayne Gray
  • Joshua Linn
  • Richard Morgenstern

Abstract

The recovery of the U.S. manufacturing sector following the 2008-2009 economic recession coincided with a sharp drop in natural gas prices. To determine whether a causal connection in fact exists, we use confidential plant-level data for 1972-2012 to estimate the employment effects of changes in natural gas and other energy prices. Previous analyses have used aggregated data and failed to control for multiple drivers of employment dynamics, such as other input costs. We show that controlling for these factors substantially diminishes the effects of natural gas and electricity prices on manufacturing employment. Accounting for the direct effects of natural gas prices as well as the indirect effects via electricity prices, we estimate that the decline in natural gas prices between 2007 and 2012 raised overall manufacturing employment by 0.6 percent, and for gas-intensive industries, by 1.8 percent.

Suggested Citation

  • Wayne Gray & Joshua Linn & Richard Morgenstern, 2019. "The Impacts of Lower Natural Gas Prices on Jobs in the U.S. Manufacturing Sector," The Energy Journal, , vol. 40(5), pages 169-193, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:enejou:v:40:y:2019:i:5:p:169-193
    DOI: 10.5547/01956574.40.5.wgra
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5547/01956574.40.5.wgra
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.5547/01956574.40.5.wgra?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Energy boom; Employment effects; U.S. manufacturing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F0 - International Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:enejou:v:40:y:2019:i:5:p:169-193. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.