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The role of inventories and speculative trading in the global market for crude oil

TLDR
The authors developed a structural model of the global market for crude oil that for the first time explicitly allows for shocks to the speculative demand for oil as well as shocks to flow demand and flow supply.
Abstract
SUMMARY We develop a structural model of the global market for crude oil that for the first time explicitly allows for shocks to the speculative demand for oil as well as shocks to flow demand and flow supply. The speculative component of the real price of oil is identified with the help of data on oil inventories. Our estimates rule out explanations of the 2003–2008 oil price surge based on unexpectedly diminishing oil supplies and based on speculative trading. Instead, this surge was caused by unexpected increases in world oil consumption driven by the global business cycle. There is evidence, however, that speculative demand shifts played an important role during earlier oil price shock episodes including 1979, 1986 and 1990. Our analysis implies that additional regulation of oil markets would not have prevented the 2003–2008 oil price surge. We also show that, even after accounting for the role of inventories in smoothing oil consumption, our estimate of the short-run price elasticity of oil demand is much higher than traditional estimates from dynamic models that do not account for for the endogeneity of the price of oil. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Investor Flows and the 2008 Boom/Bust in Oil Prices

TL;DR: It is argued that informational frictions and the associated speculative activity may induce prices to drift away from “fundamental” values, and may result in price booms and busts.
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Speculators, Commodities and Cross-Market Linkages

TL;DR: This article used a non-public dataset of individual trader positions in 17 U.S. commodity futures markets to provide novel evidence on those markets' financialization in the past decade and found that the correlation between the rates of return on commodities and equities rises with greater participation by speculators generally, hedge funds especially, and funds that trade in both equity and commodity markets in particular.
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Index Funds, Financialization, and Commodity Futures Markets

TL;DR: The lack of a direct empirical link between index fund trading and commodity futures prices casts considerable doubt on the belief that index funds fueled a price bubble as mentioned in this paper. But, the data and methods used in these studies are subject to criticisms that limit the confidence one can place in their results.
Journal ArticleDOI

Structural Interpretation of Vector Autoregressions with Incomplete Identification: Revisiting the Role of Oil Supply and Demand Shocks

TL;DR: In this article, the importance of shocks to oil supply and demand was revisited and it was shown that supply disruptions are a bigger factor in historical oil price movements and inventory accumulation a smaller factor than implied by earlier estimates.
Posted Content

Gasoline Prices, Fuel Economy, and the Energy Paradox

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References
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Posted Content

Not All Oil Price Shocks are Alike: Disentangling Demand and Supply Shocks in the Crude Oil Market

TL;DR: In this paper, a structural decomposition of the real price of crude oil in four components is proposed: oil supply shocks driven by political events in OPEC countries; other oil supply shock; aggregate shocks to the demand for industrial commodities; and demand shocks that are specific to the crude oil market.
Journal ArticleDOI

Not All Oil Price Shocks Are Alike: Disentangling Demand and Supply Shocks in the Crude Oil Market

TL;DR: In this article, a structural decomposition of the real price of crude oil is proposed, based on a newly developed measure of global real economic activity, and the authors estimate the dynamic effects of these shocks on the real prices of oil.
Journal ArticleDOI

What are the effects of monetary policy on output? Results from an agnostic identification procedure

TL;DR: The authors proposed to estimate the effects of monetary policy shocks by a new agnostic method, imposing sign restrictions on the impulse responses of prices, nonborrowed reserves and the federal funds rate in response to a monetary policy shock.
Journal ArticleDOI

The impact of oil price shocks on the u.s. stock market

TL;DR: In this paper, the reaction of U.S. real stock returns to an oil price shock differs greatly depending on whether the change in the price of oil is driven by demand or supply shocks in the oil market.
ReportDOI

Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007–08

TL;DR: This article explored similarities and differences between the run-up of oil prices in 2007-08 and earlier oil price shocks, looking at what caused these price increases and what effects they had on the economy.
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What is the importance of crude oil in the global economy?

The provided paper does not directly address the importance of crude oil in the global economy.