Identifying Oil Price Shocks and Their Consequences: The Role of Expectations in the Crude Oil Market
31 Pages Posted: 22 May 2018
Date Written: May 17, 2018
Abstract
This paper proposes a simple but comprehensive structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model to examine the underlying factors of oil price dynamics. The distinguishing feature is to explicitly assess the role of expectations on future aggregate demand and oil supply in addition to the traditional realized aggregate demand and supply factors. Our empirical analysis shows that identified future demand and supply shocks explain about 30-35 percent of historical oil price fluctuations. In particular, future oil supply shocks are more than twice as important as realized and future demand shocks in accounting for oil price developments. The empirical result indicates that the influence of oil price shocks on global output varies according to the nature of each shock. We also show that the financial factors and the development of shale-oil technology are additional relevant sources of oil price fluctuations.
Keywords: Oil demand and supply, Oil price, Structural vector autoregressive model
JEL Classification: C32, E44, G12, G15
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