This paper presents a hybrid wavelet support vector machines (WSVM) model that combines both wavelet technique and the SVM model for crude oil price forecasting. Based on the purpose, the main time series was decomposed to some multi-frequently time series by wavelet theory and these time series were imposed as input data to the SVM for forecasting of crude oil price series. To assess the effec...

B etween 1986 and 1998, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil remained quite stable, fluctuating between $16 and $42 constant 2011-U.S. dollars, with the exception of a brief spike in 1990 at the time of the first Gulf War. In December 1998, the barrel of WTI had reached a low point of $17. Almost 10 years later, in July 2008, the same barrel cost $134. By March 2009, the p...

Acute volatile movements in primary commodity prices have drawn enough interests from empirical researchers. Exports of these commodities account for the bulk of export earnings of developing countries. The traditional demand based framework has been unable to explain the marked deterioration in these prices during 1980s. This paper tries to ascertain the role played by real oil prices in expla...

The world oil market is modelled as a two-person non-zero-sum game in normal form with each player having a continuum of strategies. The two players are the oil importing nations (OPIC) and the oil exporting nations (OPEC). The game is solved in the noncooperative sense using the equilibrium point solution concept due to Nash. The Nash equilibrium point solution yields an analytic expression fo...

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 U.S. economy that would follow the scripts of the oil shocks of 1973, 1978, and 1990. Real oil prices did increase, indeed more than tripled, from $20 in 2001:Q4 to $62 in 2006:Q3 (in 2007 dollars). But the ailments associated w...

From 1997 through 2003, the UN Oil for Food Program allowed Iraq to export oil for humanitarian supplies. We hypothesize that Iraq deliberately set the price of its oil below market prices to solicit bribes from oil buyers. By comparing the price gap between Iraqi oil and its close substitutes during the Program to the gap prior to the Program, we find evidence of significant underpricing. Our ...