On The Sources Of Oil Price Fluctuations

Analyzing macroeconomic impacts of oil price changes requires first to investigate different sources of these changes and their distinct effects. Kilian (2009) analyzes the effects of an oil supply shock, an aggregate demand shock, and a precautionary oil demand shock. The paper's aim is to model macroeconomic consequences of these shocks within a new Keynesian DSGE framework. It models a small open economy and the rest of the world together to discover both accompanying effects of oil price changes and their international transmission mechanisms. Our results indicate that different sources of oil price fluctuations bring remarkably diverse outcomes for both economies.

Building on recent work on the role of speculation and inventories in oil markets, we embed a competitive oil storage model within a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. This enables us to formally analyze the impact of a (speculative) storage demand shock and to assess how the effects of various demand and supply shocks change in the presence of oil storage facility. We find that business-cycle driven oil demand shocks are the most important drivers of U.S. oil price fluctuations during 1982-2007. Disregarding the storage facility in the model causes a considerable upward bias in the estimated role of oil supply shocks in driving oil price fluctuations. Our results also confirm that a change in the composition of shocks helps explain the resilience of the macroeconomic environment to the oil price surge after 2003. Finally, speculative storage is shown to have a mitigating or amplifying role depending on the nature of the shock.

This paper presents a simple macroeconomic model of the oil market. The model incorporates features of oil supply such as depletion, endogenous oil exploration and extraction, as well as features of oil demand such as the secular increase in demand from emerging-market economies, usage efficiency, and endogenous demand responses. The model provides, inter alia, a useful analytical framework to explore the effects of: a change in world GDP growth; a change in the efficiency of oil usage; and a change in the supply of oil. Notwithstanding that shale oil production today is more responsive to prices than conventional oil, our analysis suggests that an era of prolonged low oil prices is likely to be followed by a period where oil prices overshoot their long-term upward trend.

We study the effects of oil-price shocks on the U.S. economy combining narrative and quantitative approaches. After examining daily oil-related events since 1984, we classify them into various event types. We then develop measures of exogenous shocks that avoid endogeneity and predictability concerns. Estimation results indicate that oil-price shocks have had substantial and statistically significant effects during the last 25 years. In contrast, traditional VAR approaches imply much weaker and insignificant effects for the same period. This discrepancy stems from the inability of VARs to separate exogenous oil-supply shocks from endogenous oil-price fluctuations driven by changes in oil demand.

While oil price fluctuations in the past can be explained by pure supply factors, this book argues that it is monetary policy that plays a significant role in setting global oil prices. It is a key factor often neglected in much of the earlier literature on the determinants of asset prices, including oil prices. However, this book presents a framework for modeling oil prices while incorporating monetary policy. It also provides a complete theoretical basis of the determinants of crude oil prices and the transmission channels of oil shocks to the economy. Moreover, using several up-to-date surveys and examples from the real world, this book gives insight into the empirical side of energy economics. The empirical studies offer explanations for the impact of monetary policy on crude oil prices in different periods including during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008–2009, the impact of oil price variations on developed and emerging economies, the effectiveness of monetary policy in the Japanese economy incorporating energy prices, and the macroeconomic impacts of oil price movements in trade-linked cases. This must-know information on energy economics is presented in a reader-friendly format without being overloaded with excessive and complicated calculations. enUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>

How much does speculation contribute to oil price volatility? We revisit this contentious question by estimating a sign-restricted structural vector autoregression (SVAR). First, using a simple storage model, we show that revisions to expectations regarding oil market fundamentals and the effect of mispricing in oil derivative markets can be observationally equivalent in a SVAR model of the world oil market à la Kilian and Murphy (2013), since both imply a positive co-movement of oil prices and inventories. Second, we impose additional restrictions on the set of admissible models embodying the assumption that the impact from noise trading shocks in oil derivative markets is temporary. Our additional restrictions effectively put a bound on the contribution of speculation to short-term oil price volatility (lying between 3 and 22 percent). This estimated short-run impact is smaller than that of flow demand shocks but possibly larger than that of flow supply shocks.

The sharp drop in oil prices is one of the most important global economic developments over the past year. The SDN finds that (i) supply factors have played a somewhat larger role than demand factors in driving the oil price drop, (ii) a substantial part of the price decline is expected to persist into the medium term, although there is large uncertainty, (iii) lower oil prices will support global growth, (iv) the sharp oil price drop could still trigger financial strains, and (v) policy responses should depend on the terms-of-trade impact, fiscal and external vulnerabilities, and domestic cyclical position.

This paper presents a simple macroeconomic model of the oil market. The model incorporates features of oil supply such as depletion, endogenous oil exploration and extraction, as well as features of oil demand such as the secular increase in demand from emerging-market economies, usage efficiency, and endogenous demand responses. The model provides, inter alia, a useful analytical framework to explore the effects of: a change in world GDP growth; a change in the efficiency of oil usage; and a change in the supply of oil. Notwithstanding that shale oil production today is more responsive to prices than conventional oil, our analysis suggests that an era of prolonged low oil prices is likely to be followed by a period where oil prices overshoot their long-term upward trend.