Do Migrant Farm Workers Cause Increased Crime?
Crime is once again a major issue in the presidential election. Although less so in…
Author Brock Smith
Brock Smith
Brock Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics at Montana State University. He received a PhD from UC-Davis in 2013 and spent three years as a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Analysis of Resource Rich Economies. He mainly studies effects of oil and natural gas shocks in both an international and domestic US setting.
An Uncertain Outlook for the Pandemic Economy
Covid-19 cases are surging again. After about a month of gentle decline, caseloads have spiked…
Dark Days for Oil Companies
Covid-19 has wrought widespread economic devastation, but the oil sector has been hit particularly hard.…
Understanding the Paycheck Protection Program for Small Businesses
Last week I wrote some thoughts about how the federal government should address the economic…
Preventing an Economic Plague
The Coronavirus is bringing economic calamity to every corner of the country. Unemployment claims in…
The Role of Reclamation in Managing Coal’s Decline
The Trump administration has made every effort to arrest the decline of coal in the…
The Future of Montana’s Energy Mix
Last August Northwestern Energy, Montana’s largest electricity supplier, released an “Electricity Supply Resource Procurement Plan,”…
Economic News to Be Thankful For
There are plenty of things in the world to be worried about, and day-to-day news…
How do Local Oil Booms Impact Agriculture?
There is a large literature in Economics on a phenomenon called the “Resource Curse”: the…
The Keystone XL Pipeline: What’s in it for Montana?
The Keystone Oil Pipeline has been a decade-long saga of on-again, off-again construction and never-ending…