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Journal Article
Did speculation drive oil prices? market fundamentals suggest otherwise
Oil market speculation became an especially popular topic when the price of crude tripled over 18 months to a record high $145 per barrel in July 2008. Of particular interest to many is whether speculators drove oil prices beyond what fundamentals would have otherwise justified. We explore this issue over two Economic Letters. In this article, we look at evidence from the physical market for oil and conclude that fundamentals, and not speculation, were behind the dramatic rise and fall in oil prices. In our companion Economic Letter, we examine the futures market.
GDP Gain Realized in Shale Boom’s First 10 Years
The U.S. shale boom has benefited the nation’s oil trade balance and oil-producing regions and led to unusually large employment and output gains.
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
Countercyclical Fluctuations in Uncertainty are Endogenous
This paper uses a battery of calibrated and estimated structural models to determine the causal drivers of the negative correlation between output and aggregate uncertainty. We find the transmission of uncertainty shocks to output is weak, while aggregate uncertainty endogenously responds to first moment shocks in the presence of labor market search frictions. This indicates that countercyclical movements in aggregate uncertainty are endogenous responses to changes in output, rather than exogenous impulses. A vector autoregression on simulated data shows recursive identification techniques do ...
Better Vehicle Batteries Needed to Power Energy Transition
A large-scale conversion to electric vehicles (EVs), necessary for a successful transition from fossil fuels, has yet to occur despite dramatic improvements in battery costs and performance over the past decade.
Solar Lights Up Outlook for Renewable Energy in Texas
Improving economics and government tax incentives have spurred investment in utility-scale solar facilities in Texas.
Automakers' Bold Plans for Electric Vehicles Spur Battery Boom
Meeting ambitious manufacturing goals will require batteries—lots of them—as an electric vehicle (EV) can use hundreds to thousands of individual lithium-ion batteries.
Working Paper
The U.S. Shale Oil Boom, the Oil Export Ban, and the Economy: A General Equilibrium Analysis
This paper examines the effects of the U.S. shale oil boom in a two-country DSGE model where countries produce crude oil, refined oil products, and a non-oil good. The model incorporates different types of crude oil that are imperfect substitutes for each other as inputs into the refining sector. The model is calibrated to match oil market and macroeconomic data for the U.S. and the rest of the world (ROW). We investigate the implications of a significant increase in U.S. light crude oil production similar to the shale oil boom. Consistent with the data, our model predicts that light oil ...
Working Paper
Fuel subsidies, the oil market and the world economy
This paper studies the e ffects of oil producing countries' fuel subsidies on the oil market and the world economy. We identify 24 oil producing countries with fuel subsidies where retail fuel prices are about 34 percent of the world price. We construct a two-country model where one country represents the oil-exporting subsidizers and the second the oil-importing bloc, and calibrate the model to match recent data. We find that the removal of subsidies would reduce the world price of oil by six percent. The removal of subsidies is unambiguously welfare enhancing for the oil-importing ...
Dallas Fed Energy Survey Results Point to Bleak Outlook for Oil Industry
The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil has plunged more than 50 percent since the start of the year as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has taken hold and a dispute between energy giants Saudi Arabia and Russia threatens to flood the market with crude oil.