Search Results
Journal Article
When oil prices jump, is speculation to blame?
Whenever the price at the pump climbs week after week, people start pointing fingers at investment banks, hedge funds and other speculators. This article quantifies the role that speculation played in the rise of oil prices during the past decade.
Journal Article
U.S. gasoline imports rise following temporary easing of fuel standards
EPA fuel standards were temporarily waived following major Gulf Coast hurricanes in 2005 and 2008, including Katrina. The results suggest that more uniform environmental standards could help foreign refiners meet extraordinary U.S. gasoline demand.
Working Paper
The price of gasoline and the demand for fuel economy: evidence from monthly new vehicles sales data
This paper uses a unique data set of monthly new vehicle sales by detailed model from 1978- 2007, and implements a new identification strategy to estimate the effect of the price of gasoline on consumer demand for fuel economy. We control for unobserved vehicle and consumer characteristics by using within model-year changes in the price of gasoline and vehicle sales. We find a significant demand response, as nearly half of the decline in market share of U.S. manufacturers from 2002-2007 was due to the increase in the price of gasoline. On the other hand, an increase in the gasoline tax would ...
Journal Article
Why do gasoline prices react to things that have not happened?
Some people complain they are being gouged at the pump, but raising prices now in anticipation of what might happen helps ensure an adequate gas supply.
Speech
Energy and the economy
a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Working Paper
The effect of gasoline prices on household location
Gasoline prices influence where households decide to locate by changing the cost of commuting. Consequently, the substantial increase in gas prices since 2003 may have reduced the demand for housing in areas far from employment centers, leading to a decrease in the price and/or quantity of housing in those locations relative to locations closer to jobs. Using annual panel data on ZIP codes and municipalities in a large number of metropolitan areas of the United States from 1981 to 2008, we find that a 10 percent increase in gas prices leads to a 10 percent decrease in construction after 4 ...
Journal Article
In the eye of the storm: gasoline markets after the hurricanes
Journal Article
Regional Gasoline Price Dynamics
A large literature has argued that gasoline prices respond more rapidly to increases in oil prices than to decreases in oil prices. Moreover, some of this literature has found heterogeneous asymmetry in gas price responses across cities. Here, we reconsider the causes of heterogeneous asymmetric pass-through. Consistent with the previous literature, we find heterogeneity in the magnitudes of asymmetric pass-through across cities. We also find a large number of cities that exhibit no asymmetries. We then examine whether heterogeneous asymmetry results from city-level differences in (i) the ...
Journal Article
Can Higher Gasoline Prices Set Off an Inflationary Spiral?
In early 2022, with consumer price inflation already high, a spike in the price of gasoline increased public concerns that the U.S. economy could be in for a repeat of the inflationary spiral that gripped the nation in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, energy price increases created an environment where rising inflation and rising inflation expectations reinforced one another until a deep economic contraction broke the feedback loop.Nida Çakır Melek, Francis M. Dillon, and A. Lee Smith assess the risk of a similar spiral in the current environment by exploring whether high inflation ...