A Planet Money guide to 5 fascinating new econ papers Planet Money

The economics world has countless people doing fascinating research, and as much as we try at Planet Money, there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t end up covering. So periodically, we like to do a little roundup of interesting research we’ve come across and share it with you in the Planet Money newsletter.

A long economic history of firewood in America

Carnegie Mellon University economist Nicholas Muller explains how central firewood used to be in the American economy. Firewood was humanity’s main energy source for centuries.

Yet, despite that, scholars have long lacked solid statistics about firewood prices over the long sweep of history. Muller explains that one big reason for this is that many Americans chopped down wood themselves. They often didn’t buy it in the market, so historical prices have been hard to come by.

But as cities grew, many Americans could no longer chop down wood themselves. And so market transactions for firewood began to take place. Newspapers began publishing firewood prices in their classified sections. In this study, Muller finds more than 6,000 price quotes from historical sources and constructs a price index for firewood going all the way back to 1700.

+ Around 1860, firewood accounted for around 85% of energy consumption in the United States.

+ In the 1830s, the U.S. started to see large-scale coal production. However, coal remained relatively expensive compared with firewood, so it took a while for coal to dominate the U.S. energy market.

+ During the early- to mid-19th century, the price of firewood outpaced overall inflation. Firewood kept getting more and more expensive. Meanwhile, coal got cheaper and cheaper. “The change in relative prices of these fuels appears to have played a fundamental role in the transition from wood to coal,” Muller writes.

+ After 1870, demand for firewood began declining, and coal became the hottest energy source in the nation. By 1900, coal accounted for 71% of energy use in the United States. After World War I, Muller writes, coal’s dominance began being eroded away by oil and natural gas.

This firewood paper reminded us of a classic paper from Yale University economist William Nordhaus, who calculated how the cost of lighting changed over a thousand years. Check out this Planet Money episode about it.

Political spending in the wake of school shootings

Between 2000 and 2024, the economists write, there were more than 500 school shootings in the U.S. that resulted in at least one fatality. “Yet rather than leading to significant policy change, these tragedies rarely result in more than empty promises,” the economists write. They point to one significant reason for this.

The economists find that pro-gun political action committees “increase contributions by 30.2% to [congressional] candidates in districts with fatal school shootings.”

This spending appears to be strategic. The economists find that pro-gun PACs increase spending only really in congressional districts that see fatal school shootings, not nonfatal school shootings or other mass shootings. The PACs’ spending ramps up as elections approach and is mostly concentrated in congressional districts where elections are competitive.

NIMBYism spreads to the Sunbelt?

The research of economists Ed Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko has long shined a spotlight on the problem of housing supply in the United States. We’re not building enough housing, and it has been causing a housing affordability crisis.

“From 2000-2024, Miami, Tampa and Phoenix ranked 1st, 5th, and 9th, in price growth across the twenty areas that make up the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20 City Composite Home Price NSA Index,” the economists write. “Each of these areas experienced more price growth than the New York City area, whose prices still increased by a healthy 70 percent. Between 1975 and 1999, no sunbelt city (outside of California) was among the top twelve of the same 20 markets.”

Why have Sunbelt regions begun to look more like coastal regions in recent years, with a lower rate of new housing construction and an explosion of home prices? The economists hypothesize that, basically, NIMBYism has spread there. They suggest that “wealthier or better educated residents” have moved in and altered the regulatory environment, making it harder to build housing.

The economists find that, if the rate of new housing construction between 2000 and 2020 looked like it did between 1980 and 2000, “America would have 15 million more housing units.”

Interestingly, coastal regions have begun to reckon with the regulatory barriers to building new housing. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom took actions to roll back environmental regulations that have held back development in California.

The economic effects of Native American casinos 

A new working paper from economists Randall Akee, Maggie R. Jones and Emilia Simeonova categorizes tribal gaming as a kind of “place-based policy,” a program aimed at economically developing an impoverished community as opposed to directly helping individuals.

On that front, tribal gaming seems to have been remarkably successful. It’s now an industry that rakes in more than $40 billion a year. And the economists find that it is a real engine of opportunities for Native Americans. They find “significantly higher employment of American Indians in the Accommodations, Food Services, Arts and Entertainment Industries compared with non-casino reservation ZIP codes in the same state. Further, we find an increase in wages for AIAN workers in these same industries, suggesting both an expansion of employment and better compensation in this sector for American Indians.” Casinos also bring in money that tribes use in various ways to help their communities, including cash transfers to tribe members, infrastructure, education and business investment.

Longer kindergarten school days boost mothers’ work hours

A new study by economists Chloe Gibbs, Jocelyn S. Wikle and Riley Wilson offers more evidence supporting this idea. The working paper is titled “A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families.”

The economists do a bunch of impressive statistical work to look at the casual effect of this change on family work hours. Interestingly, they find that this change hardly affected fathers, on average. They find that men with kids in half-day kindergarten “actually spend more time at work than fathers of full-day kindergarten students.”

P.S. If you come across interesting economics papers and want us to include them in future newsletters like this one, send away! Email us at planetmoney@.org.