Geographic Dispersion of Economic Shocks: Evidence from the Fracking Revolution: Comment

Feyrer, Mansur, and Sacerdote (2017) estimates the spatial dispersion of the effects of the recent shale-energy boom by unconditionally regressing income and employment on energy production at various levels of geographic aggregation. However, producing counties tend to be located near each other and receive inward spillovers from neighboring production. This inflates the estimated effect of own-county production and spatial aggregation does not address this. We propose an alternative estimation strategy that accounts for these spillovers and identify reduced propagation effects. The proposed estimation strategy can be applied more generally to estimate the dispersion of multiple, simultaneously occurring economic shocks.