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Don’t Look to Oil Companies to Lower High Retail Gasoline Prices
While U.S. retail gasoline prices in many regions have remained stubbornly high since March, this situation reflects frictions in the retail gasoline market rather than the supply of oil or the price of oil.
Working Paper
Estimating Macroeconomic News and Surprise Shocks
The importance of understanding the economic effects of TFP news and surprise shocks is widely recognized in the literature. This paper examines the ability of the state-of-the-art VAR approach in Kurmann and Sims (2021) to identify responses to TFP news shocks and possibly surprise shocks in theory and practice. When applied to data generated from conventional New Keynesian DSGE models with shock processes that match key TFP moments, this estimator tends to be strongly biased, both in the presence of TFP measurement error and in its absence. This bias worsens in realistically small samples, ...
Working Paper
Oil Prices, Exchange Rates and Interest Rates
There has been much interest in the relationship between the price of crude oil, the value of the U.S. dollar, and the U.S. interest rate since the 1980s. For example, the sustained surge in the real price of oil in the 2000s is often attributed to the declining real value of the U.S. dollar as well as low U.S. real interest rates, along with a surge in global real economic activity. Quantifying these effects one at a time is difficult not only because of the close relationship between the interest rate and the exchange rate, but also because demand and supply shocks in the oil market in turn ...
How the Saudi Decision to Launch a Price War Is Reshaping the Global Oil Market
In the second week of March, the already fragile global oil market was rocked by Saudi Arabia’s announcement that it would expand oil production to unprecedented levels, signaling an end to its price cooperation with Russia.
Working Paper
On the finite-sample accuracy of nonparametric resampling algorithms for economic time series
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in nonparametric bootstrap inference for economic time series. Nonparametric resampling techniques help protect against overly optimistic inference in time series models of unknown structure. They are particularly useful for evaluating the fit of dynamic economic models in terms of their spectra, impulse responses, and related statistics, because they do not require a correctly specified economic model. Notwithstanding the potential advantages of nonparametric bootstrap methods, their reliability in small samples is questionable. In this ...
Working Paper
A Broader Perspective on the Inflationary Effects of Energy Price Shocks
Consumers purchase energy in many forms. Sometimes energy goods are consumed directly, for instance, in the form of gasoline used to operate a vehicle, electricity to light a home or natural gas to heat a home. At other times, the cost of energy is embodied in the prices of goods and services that consumers buy, say when purchasing an airline ticket or when buying online garden furniture made from plastic to be delivered by mail. Previous research has focused on quantifying the pass-through of the price of crude oil or the price of motor gasoline to U.S. inflation. Neither approach accounts ...
Working Paper
Understanding the Estimation of Oil Demand and Oil Supply Elasticities
This paper examines the advantages and drawbacks of alternative methods of estimating oil supply and oil demand elasticities and of incorporating this information into structural VAR models. I not only summarize the state of the literature, but also draw attention to a number of econometric problems that have been overlooked in this literature. Once these problems are recognized, seemingly conflicting conclusions in the recent literature can be resolved. My analysis reaffirms the conclusion that the one-month oil supply elasticity is close to zero, which implies that oil demand shocks are the ...
What Is the U.S. Oil Industry Doing About Greenhouse Gas Emissions?
Oil companies have felt compelled to react both in anticipation of new regulatory policies and in response to growing pressure from investors.
Trade diversion has helped ease the impact of the embargo on Russian oil
Much has been made about the effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the price of oil. However, the price of oil was already drifting upward well before the invasion in late February 2022.
Oil Market’s Tightening in February Seemingly Defies Fundamentals
Surging oil prices in February have raised hopes that the worst may be over for oil markets, though recent evidence suggests that the recovery will not last.