BP awarded $150,000 to a University professor to study how the April 20 well blowout will affect businesses in Louisiana, according to a University news release.
Kelley Pace, professor of finance in the E.J. Ourso College of Business and the Louisiana Real Estate Commission Chair of Real Estate, received the funding through August 2011 for the proposal “Decision Making in Post-Catastrophe Uncertainty: An Examination of Impacts of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill on Local Businesses in Coastal Louisiana.”
“Louisiana coastal firms have been subjected to various hurricanes over the last decade,” Pace said in the release.
“Now those same firms are dealing with the aftermath of the oil spill and the moratorium.”
Pace’s research will “disentangle the effects of these various events” and will be aided by a doctoral student in the Department of Finance, a graduate student in environmental sciences and undergraduate students from the Public Policy Research Lab.
“The grant mainly funds data collection, and the resulting data will be used in seeking additional research funding from external sources,” Pace said in the release. “However, there will be some basic analysis of the data that will be made available to the public by the end of the current grant.”