Recently developed structural models of the global crude oil market imply that the surge in the real price of oil between mid 2003 and mid 2008 was driven by repeated positive shocks to the demand for all industrial commodities, reflecting unexpectedly high growth mainly in emerging Asia. We evaluate this proposition using an alternative data source and a different econometric methodology. Rath...

Views stated in Policy Discussion Papers are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Materials may be reprinted, provided that the source is credited. Please send copies of reprinted materials to the editor. Every U.S. recession since 1971 has been preceded by two things: an oil price sho...

This paper is one in a set of related papers recently put forward by Gert Peersman, in conjunction with the co-authors of this paper, Christiane Baumeister and Ine Van Robays. This body of work commendably attempts to more thoroughly explore the empirical linkages between oil price fluctuations and real economic outcomes for a variety of countries, in the hope of drawing together some general r...

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, many economists feared that the war would lead to a sharp decline in Iraqi oil production, a spike in oil prices, and a woeful economy that would follow the scripts of the oil shocks of 1973, 1978, and 1990. There was in fact a moderate decline in world oil production, and real oil prices increased from $20 in 2001:4 to $62 in 2006:3. But the ailments a...

We show that crude oil production from existing wells in Texas does not respond to current or expected future oil prices, contradicting a basic prediction of Hotelling’s (1931) canonical model of exhaustible resource extraction. In contrast, the drilling of new wells exhibits a strong price response, as does the rental rate on drilling rigs. To explain these observations, we reformulate Hotelli...

Traditional approaches to structural interpretation of vector autoregressions can be viewed as special cases of Bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs about certain aspects of the model. These traditional methods can be generalized with a less restrictive Bayesian formulation that allows the researcher to summarize uncertainty coming not just from the data but also uncertaint...

In this paper, using the co-integrated VAR model we attempt to empirically investigate the effects of oil price and monetary shocks on the Russian economy covering the period 1995:Q3-2007:Q4. Our finding is that real GDP and inflation in Russia exhibit a positive response to an oil price increase, but not in the case of interest rates. Also we see that the impact of the oil price shock on the e...