Coal and family through the boom and bust: A look at the coal Industry's impact on marriage and divorce * Michael R. Betz * , Anastasia Snyder Department of Human Sciences, The Ohio State University, United States article info Article history: Received 22 November 2016 Received in revised form 31 August 2017 Accepted 18 September 2017 Available online 12 October 2017 abstract Rural America has a long relationship with the coal industry. Long-term shifts toward less labor intensive practices in the industry, coupled with policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions have resulted in substantial employment losses in coal communities. While the economic impacts of declining industries in rural America have been documented, less work has been done to investigate the impact of coal employment losses on social outcomes. We address this gap in the literature by assessing the association between county-level measures of coal employment and marriage, divorce, and cohabitation in nonmetro America. We use a novel proprietary data set to isolate the relationship between marital outcome and coal mining from all other types of mining that aggregated in publicly available data sets. Additionally, we compare these relationships across boom and bust periods. We find that after con- trolling for total employment growth, the presence of coal mining in a county is significantly associated with marital outcomes and these relationships differ across nonmetro and metro areas. We find some evidence that rural areas that typically have more experience with extraction industries display greater resilience to both positive and negative coal industry shocks compared to metropolitan counties. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The coal industry has long held a prominent place in rural America. For over a hundred years, coal has been the main fuel source for electricity generation in the United States (US EIA, 2011). A long line of research has sought to uncover the short- and long- term effects of natural resource extraction on the communities in which it occurs (Betz et al., 2015; Partridge et al., 2013; Deaton and Niman, 2012; Douglas and Walker, 2012; Bell and York, 2010; Rosser, 2006; Black et al., 2005; Freudenburg, 1992). Extraction industries are different from other industries in several respects, and thus may have unique impacts on communities. Because many natural resources, like coal, take hundreds of millions of years to form, the industry must locate in places where it already exists. This means coal communities potentially have leverage to set the terms under which extraction occurs, which might suggest the presence of coal within a community would have positive economic and social impacts. However, in practice, many studies have shown that natural resource abundance can distort positive economic and so- cial forces and leave communities worse off in the long run, a phenomenon referred to as the “natural resource curse” (Auty, 1997; Sachs and Warner, 2001; Van der Ploeg, 2011; Deaton and Niman, 2012). While there have been several recent investigations into the economic impacts of natural resource development in the United States (Lobao et al., 2016; Betz et al., 2015; Marchand, 2012; Deaton and Niman, 2012; James and Aadland, 2011), less work has been done on the coal industry's social impacts, very few have examined implications for marriage, and those that have are qualitative in nature and have examined a single specific context (Duff, 2004). Our study is the first to estimate quantitative associations between coal mining and marriage outcomes for all counties in the United States. This work is particularly germane given the Trump admin- istration's current efforts to revitalize the coal industry in the United States. * This study was partially supported by the Appalachian Research Initiative for Environmental Science (ARIES). ARIES is an industrial affiliates program at Virginia Tech, supported by members that include companies in the energy sector. The research under ARIES is conducted by independent researchers in accordance with the policies on scientific integrity of their institutions. The views, opinions and recommendations expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not imply any endorsement by ARIES employees, other ARIES-affiliated researchers or industrial members. This study has not been read or reviewed by ARIES officials. Information about ARIES can be found at http://www.energy.vt.edu/ARIES. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: betz.40@osu.edu (M.R. Betz). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.09.011 0743-0167/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Rural Studies 56 (2017) 207e218