Oil Price Shocks, Inventories and Macroeconomic Dynamics

This paper employs disaggregated manufacturing data to investigate the causes of the time delay between an increase in oil prices and the following slowdown in economic activity. VAR results show that, unlike aggregate GDP, the effect of an oil price shock on new motor vehicles production shows up immediately and is statistically significantly. After one quarter, similar patterns are observed for industries that are oil-intensive or for which motor vehicles constitute a demand-shifter. The continuing fall in manufacturing production then leads the economy into a recession. The paper then estimates a modified linear-quadratic inventory model and shows that this description of the oil price dynamics is consistent with rational behavior by firms. An increase in oil prices leads to a decline in manufacturing sales; partly because the shock catches manufacturers by surprise and partly because of their desire to balance the accelerator and production smoothing motives, manufacturers deviate from the target level of inventories and spread the decline in production over various quarters. Moreover, the dynamics entailed by the structural estimates capture two stylized facts about inventory behavior: procyclicality and persistence.