Kelly Neill, a 3rd year graduate student, is the co-recipient of an NBER Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year. The Award was financed with a grant to the NBER from the Sloan Foundation. It provides a stipend, tuition payment, and a research fund to support costs such as travel expenses to professional meetings. Kelly will also be invited to participate in the NBER Summer Institute workshop on Environmental and Energy Economics.
The NBER received twenty applications for the Fellowship. Kelly received one of three awards. The other winners were from the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University.
The award honors Kelly’s dissertation research studying natural gas pipeline networks and retail natural gas markets in Australia and the United States. In one case, Kelly is analyzing the problems caused by either a lack of physical pipeline capacity or a lack of access to the existing network. She will evaluate ways to overcome these problems with pipeline expansions, storage or secondary markets in pipeline transmission rights. In the other case, Kelly is examining how the operation of deregulated natural gas markets beyond the city gate in Australia might offer some lessons for increasing competition in city markets for natural gas in the United States. Both research projects offer opportunities to use innovative applied economic techniques. Kelly is working with a range of faculty in the economics department and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Center for Energy Studies.