Employment Impacts of Upstream Oil and Gas Investment in the United States

Technological progress in the exploration and production of oil and gas during the 2000s hasled to a boom in upstream investment and has increased the domestic supply of fossil fuels. Itis unknown, however, how many jobs this boom has created. We use time-series methods atthe national level and dynamic panel methods at the state-level to understand how the increasein exploration and production activity has impacted employment. We find robust statisticalsupport for the hypothesis that changes in drilling for oil and gas as captured by rig-counts doin fact, have an economically meaningful and positive impact on employment. The strongestimpact is contemporaneous, though months later in the year also experience statistically andeconomically meaningful growth. Once dynamic effects are accounted for, we estimate thatan additional rig-count results in the creation of 37 jobs immediately and 224 jobs in the longrun, though our robustness checks suggest that these multipliers could be bigger.