…Towns around the oil-rich Bakken formation in North Dakota, for instance, have been grappling with higher crime rates, heavy truck traffic and overcrowded schools. What’s more, there’s the risk that some counties may become overly dependent on a single industry that has a tendency to bust.
Are these downsides worth worrying about? A new paper from Headwaters Economics argues that they might be. The longitudinal study looked at various communities in six states out West — Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming — that participated heavily in the 1980 oil boom. It then examined how those areas fared in the decades after that particular boom starting waning in 1982…