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Working Paper
Heterogeneity in the Pass-Through from Oil to Gasoline Prices: A New Instrument for Estimating the Price Elasticity of Gasoline Demand
We propose a new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand that exploits systematic differences across U.S. states in the pass-through of oil price shocks to retail gasoline prices. We show that these differences are primarily driven by the cost of producing and distributing gasoline, which varies with states’ access to oil and gasoline transportation infrastructure, refinery technology and environmental regulations, creating cross-sectional gasoline price shocks in response to an aggregate oil price shock. Time-varying estimates do not support the view that the ...
Working Paper
Pitfalls in estimating asymmetric effects of energy price shocks
A common view in the literature is that the effect of energy price shocks on macroeconomic aggregates is asymmetric in energy price increases and decreases. We show that widely used asymmetric vector autoregressive models of the transmission of energy price shocks are misspecified, resulting in inconsistent parameter estimates, and that the implied impulse responses have been routinely computed incorrectly. As a result, the quantitative importance of unanticipated energy price increases for the U.S. economy has been exaggerated. In response to this problem, we develop alternative regression ...
Working Paper
Oil Price Shocks and Inflation
Despite growing interest in the impact of oil and other energy price shocks on inflation and inflation expectations, until recently this question has not received much attention. This survey not only presents empirical results for the U.S. economy, but expands the analysis to include other major economies. We find that only in the euro area and in the U.K. energy price shocks are associated with a material increase in core consumer prices. This helps explain the somewhat more persistent response of headline inflation in these countries than in the U.S. or Canada. Inflation is even less ...
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
Macroeconomic Responses to Uncertainty Shocks: The Perils of Recursive Orderings
A common practice in empirical macroeconomics is to examine alternative recursive orderings of the variables in structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models. When the implied impulse responses look similar, the estimates are considered trustworthy. When they do not, the estimates are used to bound the true response without directly addressing the identification challenge. A leading example of this practice is the literature on the effects of uncertainty shocks on economic activity. We prove by counterexample that this practice is invalid in general, whether the data generating process is a ...
Working Paper
When Is the Use of Gaussian-inverse Wishart-Haar Priors Appropriate?
Several recent studies have expressed concern that the Haar prior typically employed in estimating sign-identified VAR models is driving the prior about the structural impulse responses and hence their posterior. In this paper, we provide evidence that the quantitative importance of the Haar prior for posterior inference has been overstated. How sensitive posterior inference is to the Haar prior depends on the width of the identified set of a given impulse response. We demonstrate that this width depends not only on how much the identified set is narrowed by the identifying restrictions ...
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
Quantifying the half-life of deviations from PPP: The role of economic priors
The half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) plays a central role in the ongoing debate about the ability of macroeconomic models to account for the time series behavior of the real exchange rate. The main contribution of this paper is a general framework in which alternative priors for the half-life of deviations from PPP can be examined. We show how to incorporate formally the prior views of economists about the half-life. In our empirical analysis we provide two examples of such priors. One example is a consensus prior consistent with widely held views among economists ...
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 ...
Working Paper
The Role of the Prior in Estimating VAR Models with Sign Restrictions
Several recent studies have expressed concern that the Haar prior typically imposed in estimating sign-identified VAR models may be unintentionally informative about the implied prior for the structural impulse responses. This question is indeed important, but we show that the tools that have been used in the literature to illustrate this potential problem are invalid. Specifically, we show that it does not make sense from a Bayesian point of view to characterize the impulse response prior based on the distribution of the impulse responses conditional on the maximum likelihood estimator of ...