Community Benefits of Anchor Enterprises: Evidence from California Utility Operations

Drew Behnke, Samuel Heft-Neal and David Roland-Holst

Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley

Abstract: This report quantifies how a single large employer’s local payrolls drives three critical dimensions of the San Luis Obispo (SLO) and Santa Barbara (SB) county economy: residential home prices, real estate sector output, and the cost of outstanding municipal debt. The analysis covers 28 ZIP codes from 2015Q1 through 2024Q4 (947 ZIP-quarter observations) and uses average annual compensation from the Diablo Canyon Power Plant (DCPP) workforce as the primary salary proxy — an exogenously determined income anchor in a region with limited other large employers. All models are estimated with HC1-robust ordinary least squares (OLS), and the preferred specification for each outcome uses ZIP code fixed effects (FE) to isolate within-locality, over-time salary effects.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; Utilities; Externalities; Public finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-uep
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