Three Essays in Energy and Policy Analysis
Date
2020-01-03
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Abstract
This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I estimated the cost of lifting natural gas in Alberta. I applied activity based costing to estimate the cost of production for each well for the period under review and used this in estimating the production parameter in a Cobb-Douglas model. I subjected this to various robustness tests and the results were consistent across the variations of the data applied. The contribution of this paper is to add to empirical understanding of the cost characteristics in lifting natural gas at the well level using data from wells in Alberta, Canada. I am particularly interested in measuring for common factors affecting production costs across reservoirs and also for individual well effects. In the second chapter, I investigate how an important policy impacted crude oil production in some states in Nigeria and restored peace back in the region. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I estimate the causal effect of amnesty on crude oil production in three states of the Niger Delta region that experienced militant attacks. I find that this policy eliminated the militant activities and increased crude oil production in these three states by about 40% relative to the six control states. The results suggest that rather than the repressive actions of the government in the past, amnesty was a better solution in the short term to ensure relative peace and sustained crude oil production in the region. In the final chapter, I consider how institutional changes, once in place, effect educational outcomes. In this chapter, I examine the effect of a change from a civil law to Sharia law impacts education outcomes of Muslims in the states that adopted Sharia law. I found that contrary to the subjective reasoning of the average southern non Muslims, Sharia had no negative impact on education outcomes as a whole. I further estimated these effects by sex, age, and intensity of adoption of Sharia and found that females in High Intensive Sharia states were affected by the adoption of Sharia and they lost between half and three quarters of a year of education. On the extensive effect of Sharia conducted via probit, there was an increase in the probability of enrolment in school of between 14% and 18%. These effects are estimated through difference-in-differences and triple differences approaches.
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Conflict, Amnesty, Sharia, Education Outcomes, Natural Gas
Citation
During, A. D. (2020). Three Essays in Energy and Policy Analysis (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.