Dr. Brian Efird is the Program Director for Policy and Decision Science and Acting Program Director for Climate and Environment. He manages a multidisciplinary, multi-national team of researchers who work on quantitative models of collective decision-making processes (CDMP), geospatial information system applications for energy economics and energy policy, demography and energy, and energy policy studies of countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Dr. Efird is editor-in-chief of the Springer Scientific journal, Energy Transitions. He was previously a senior research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.; a consultant on defense and international security matters in Washington; and a consultant applying quantitative models to support corporate, investment banking, and legal negotiations in New York.

Assessing the impact of political disruptions on crude oil trade
Provides an empirical evaluation of energy trade flows, focusing on crude oil trade among the top 20 crude oil exporters and top 20 crude oil importers. We assess the potential impact of cross-national political disruptions (bilateral and regional) on energy trade between the six producing countries in the GCC and four consuming economies in Northeast Asia. We econometrically measure the impact of political disruptions on total crude oil trade for economies in these two regions to systematically address the question of how much political shocks threaten energy security and the flow of trade. We pay particular attention to how domestic, regional, and international political phenomena and irregular political crises might disrupt energy trade, and under what conditions such disruption might or might not occur. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016.
1st January 2016