The Marcellus Shale Income Gains (MSIG) Natural Experiment

• November 2016: Additional funding of $34,570 awarded

Family income has a powerful effect in shaping child well-being—multiple disciplines have documented significant and positive correlations between family income and child outcomes, including various academic, behavioral, psychological, and health indicators. Despite these associations, it is unclear whether the relationships are causal because family income is endogenous to a host of difficult-to-measure parental characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, habits and values. This makes it difficult to establish causal relationships and hinders a scientific understanding and identification of the effects of social policy interventions aimed at improving child well-being.

How can one assess the causal relationship between family income increases and child well-being? Experimental designs focused on child outcomes are the ideal method of choice, but are difficult to implement. Professor Molly Martin and her colleagues Kelly Davis, Diane McLaughlin, Wayne Osgood, and Elizabeth Ananat propose to take advantage of an emerging natural experiment—the extraction of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale geological formation—to study how increased family income affects child well-being from infancy through late adolescence. Some areas of the Marcellus are more economically viable because of the shale quality and the proximity to pipelines for transporting gas. There is also regional variation in the share of properties that had mineral rights detached during prior coal and shallow-well gas extraction. The team will seek to answer whether increases in average family income affect different domains of child well-being, and whether the effect of income on developmental outcomes varies by child age and gender.