University finance professor Joseph Mason will testify today before a U.S. Senate committee to “relay the negative economic impact” of the federal government’s offshore deepwater drilling moratorium.Mason will testify during the first witness panel in “The Deepwater Drilling Moratorium: A Second Economic Disaster for Small Businesses?” hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, according to the committee’s website. Mason recently completed a study, “The Economic Cost of a Moratorium on the Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration to the Gulf Region,” and will tell the committee how this moratorium hurts the Gulf Coast states while warning “against tax polices currently being considered in Washington that will only worsen the impact,” according to a University news release.The Obama administration first enacted a moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling on May 30 — just more than month after the Deepwater Horizon’s April 20 explosion — and while the “goal of the moratorium is to shield the Gulf from further harmful effects by limiting the likelihood of a similar oil spill in the future,” Mason’s study says the moratorium “will further depress onshore state and local economies dependent on oil production.”The study estimates the moratorium could cost the Gulf states more than $2.1 billion in output, 8,000 jobs, $487 million in wages and almost $98 million in tax revenues. More than 12,000 jobs, $2.7 billion in economic activity and $219 million in tax revenue could be lost nationally due to the moratorium, according to Mason’s study. Mason will testify with Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, Ethan Treese, vice president of the Federal Government Solutions Dun and Dradstreet and a fourth unconfirmed expert. A second panel today will include testimony from other local government and business officials. Mason, who is the Hermann Moyse Jr./Louisiana Bankers Association Endowed Chair of Banking in the E.J. Ourso College of Business, published the study this month, and Save U.S. Energy Jobs, part of the American Energy Alliance, sponsored it.Both of Louisiana’s U.S. senators are on the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, according to its website. Sen. Mary Landrieau, D-La., is one of 11 democrats on the committee and is also its chair. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., is one of eight republicans on the committee. The hearing starts at 10 a.m. EST and takes place in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. –Contact Nicholas Persac at [email protected]