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There is a strand of the economics literature that considers the regionalized economic effects of natural resource endowments. The so-called Natural Resource Curse suggests that natural resource endowments are associated with lower longterm growth rates in the areas in which the resources are located. Lower growth arises because these areas tend to specialize in the development and exploitation of the natural resources at the expense of other dynamic economic activities that offer higher long-term growth potential. Empirical evidence has, however, not reached consistent conclusions. In this paper, we take advantage of the rapid growth in oil and gas development and production in Texas over the course of a decade to consider the localized effects on inter-industry county-level employment at the NAICS-2, county-level mean and median income, and key public finance measures at both the county and school district levels. Considering the effects within a single, large and economically diverse state enables us to control for important state-level variables that influence local public finances. We find little evidence of short term effects necessary to generate the circumstance of a resource curse over the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors attempt to estimate the effect of immigration on workers' earnings by using the experiment provided by the sudden increase in the Houston, Texas area population due to the influx of people forced to move because of Hurricane Katrina. Previous research has shown that there is little evidence that wage rates fall significantly because of immigration, but none of this research considered accompanying shifts in demand. The immigration situation after Hurricane Katrina was accompanied by a proportionate increase in demand.

• Estimate the effects of industrial localization on the spatial persistence of employment. • Software publishing industry is an ideal setting to study knowledge spillovers and labor pooling. • Employment at the facility level exhibits very small persistence. • Employment within the locations of these facilities situated are very persistent. • The evidence is more consistent with labor pooling than with spillovers as the source of agglomeration. We estimate the effects of industrial localization on the spatial persistence of employment in the software industry, using establishment data from Texas for the 2000–2006 period. Locations with an initial concentration of software employment retain an excess number of employees, beyond that expected from job turnover and job persistence at the establishment level. This is not driven by differential establishment growth or survival, but it is due to (a) the retention by establishments in a location of jobs lost by other establishments in that location, and (b) the propensity of software establishments to enter in locations with prior software establishment presence. These findings are more consistent with labor channel effects than with disembodied knowledge spillovers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]