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Student Spotlight: Merrill Jones Barradale
Student Spotlight Directory
ERG PhD graduate, Merrill Jones Barradale.
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"Practitioner Perspectives Matter: Public Policy and Private Investment in the U.S. Electric Power Sector"
June 2010
Merrill Jones Barradale is a 2010 PhD graduate of the Energy and Resources Group. Her dissertation examines the influence of attitudes, beliefs, and preferences of industry professionals on investment decision-making for new electric power plants. The conclusions are based on in-depth interviews and an extensive online survey she conducted of 800 energy professionals in the U.S. power sector.
Two of the three papers comprising Merrill’s dissertation discuss investment decision-making in the face of regulatory uncertainty. One seeks to explain the surge of activity in 2005-2006 and the subsequent decline in interest in coal-fired power plant development by examining industry attitudes toward carbon policy and carbon risk. The other looks at the impact of policy uncertainty on investment decision-making in renewable energy, using the federal production tax credit (PTC) and wind energy investment as an example. These two papers are available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=931985
The energy industry has been slow to move away from fossil fuels towards renewable resources. In the third paper of her dissertation, Merrill finds evidence for a cognitive bias that plays a role in this sluggish momentum. Energy executives’ expectations for future energy prices are strongly correlated with their personal preferences, which she documents for the case of natural gas prices. This is an example of “wishful expectations,” a form of overconfidence in which people are excessively optimistic over uncontrollable future outcomes. This implies that energy executives with strong exposure to fossil fuels are excessively optimistic about future prices for non-renewables and so continue to invest despite the presence of superior alternatives.
ERG, with its wide range of interests and resources, has been an excellent environment for Merrill. Its flexible, interdisciplinary environment made this type of research possible by encouraging her to use research methods and analytic frameworks (e.g., interviews and surveys) that are unconventional in the subject area of business and investment decision making. ERG’s encouragement of research that is relevant both in academic circles and in the outside world also benefits this sort of dissertation topic. More specifically, Merrill feels grateful to have received excellent advice and encouragement from academics in a variety of disciplines, including Rich Lyons, Isha Ray, Terry Odean, and Alex Farrell.
In her time at UC Berkeley, Merrill has done quite a bit of teaching. She has served as a guest lecturer in various ERG courses, organized a course on Corporate Social Responsibility, twice been a GSI for Alex Farrell’s course on Electric Power Systems, and this past spring, taught her own graduate seminar course on Social Science Research Methods.
Merrill’s involvement with energy and environmental issues in a variety of professional capacities began in the early 1990s. Prior to coming to ERG, Merrill worked for the Czechoslovak Environment Ministry (1991-1993) and for a Zurich brokerage firm that specialized in environmentally responsible investment (1995-1997). Time spent working with Chase Manhattan Bank’s Global Power Group in New York (1999) and McKinsey & Co.’s Electric Power and Natural Gas Practice in Houston (2000-2003) were particularly influential in motivating the direction of her dissertation research at ERG.
Merrill holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, an MS in Environmental and Resource Economics from University College London, and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Merrill has recently accepted a post-doc appointment with the Economics Department at Copenhagen Business School. There she plans to work on a few more papers using additional pieces of her survey data, such as financial modeling methodology for new power plants and motivations for wind project development.
She and her husband have an energetic and ever-fascinating daughter born in 2006 and a second daughter born in May 2010, just a little earlier than expected – a day and a half before she completed and filed her dissertation. Talk about multi-tasking!
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