This book addresses the need of oil-importing countries to mitigate vulnerability to oil price volatility. It offers financial instruments to manage price risk, complemented by structural measures ...designed to reduce oil consumption.
It has been 40 years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent ...years, a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations has emerged. Drawing on this literature, we first provide an overview of the causes of all major oil price fluctuations between 1973 and 2014. We then discuss why oil price fluctuations remain difficult to predict, despite economists' improved understanding of oil markets. Unexpected oil price fluctuations are commonly referred to as oil price shocks. We document that, in practice, consumers, policymakers, financial market participants, and economists may have different oil price expectations, and that, what may be surprising to some, need not be equally surprising to others.
This study examines the linkages between energy price and food prices over the period 2000–2016 by using a Panel-VAR model in the case of eight Asian economies. Our results confirm that energy price ...(oil price) has a significant impact on food prices. According to the results of impulse response functions, agricultural food prices respond positively to any shock from oil prices. Our results show that there is a linkage between energy and food security through price volatility. Since inflation in oil price is harmful for food security, it would be necessary to diversify the energy consumption in this sector, from too much reliance on fossil fuels to an optimal combination of renewable and nonrenewable energy resources that will be in favor of not only the energy security by also the food security. In addition, the paper found that the impact of biofuel prices on food prices is statistically significant but explains less than 2% of the food price variance. However, by increasing the demand for biofuel, there should be more concern about the global increase in agricultural commodities prices and endangering food security, especially in vulnerable economies.
•Energy price (oil price) has a significant impact on food prices.•Agricultural food prices respond positively to any shock from oil prices.•Results show, 64.17% of food price variance is explained by oil price movement.•Inflation in oil price is harmful for energy security and threatening food security.•It’s necessary to diversify the energy consumption in agricultural sector.
This study estimates the benefits that Indian farmers derive from market and weather information delivered to their mobile phones by a commercial service called Reuters Market Light (RML). We conduct ...a controlled randomized experiment in 100 villages of Maharashtra. Treated farmers associate RML information with a number of decisions they have made, and we find some evidence that treatment affected spatial arbitrage and crop grading. But the magnitude of these effects is small. We find no statistically significant average effect of treatment on the price received by farmers, crop value-added, crop losses resulting from rainstorms, or the likelihood of changing crop varieties and cultivation practices. Although disappointing, these results are in line with the market take-up rate of the RML service in the study districts, which shows small numbers of clients in aggregate and a relative stagnation in take-up over the study period.
We assess the role of cognitive convenience in the popularity and rigidity of 0-ending prices in convenience settings. Studies show that 0-ending prices are common at convenience stores because of ...the transaction convenience that 0-ending prices offer. Using a large store-level retail CPI data, we find that 0-ending prices are popular and rigid at convenience stores even when they offer little transaction convenience. We corroborate these findings with two large retail scanner price datasets from Dominick’s and Nielsen. In the Dominick’s data, we find that there are more 0-endings in the prices of the items in the front-end candies category than in any other category, even though these prices have no effect on the convenience of the consumers’ check-out transaction. In addition, in both Dominick’s and Nielsen’s datasets, we find that 0-ending prices have a positive effect on demand. Ruling out consumer antagonism and retailers’ use of heuristics in pricing, we conclude that 0-ending prices are popular and rigid, and that they increase demand at convenience settings, not only for their transaction convenience, but also for the cognitive convenience they offer.
Shocks to the real price of oil may reflect oil supply shocks, shocks to the global demand for all industrial commodities, or demand shocks that are specific to the crude oil market. Each shock has ...different effects on the real price of oil and on US macroeconomic aggregates. Changes in the composition of shocks help explain why regressions of macroeconomic aggregates on oil prices tend to be unstable. Evidence that the recent surge in oil prices was driven primarily by global demand shocks helps explain why this shock so far has failed to cause a major recession in the United States. (JEL E31, E32, Q41, Q43)
Prices that end with 9, also known as psychological price points, are common, comprising about 70% of the retail prices. They are also more rigid than other prices. We take advantage of a natural ...experiment to document an emergence of a new price ending that has the same effects as 9-endings. In January 2014, the Israeli government passed a new regulation prohibiting the use of non 0-ending prices, bringing an end to 9-ending prices. We find that seven months after 9-ending prices have disappeared, 90-ending prices acquired the same status as 9-ending prices had before the new regulation was adopted. Thus, 90-ending prices became the new psychological price points, partially eliminating the regulation’s intended effect.
Can food prices cause social unrest? Throughout history, riots have frequently broken out, ostensibly as a consequence of high food prices. Using monthly data at the international level, this article ...studies the impact of food prices – food price levels as well as food price volatility – on social unrest. Because food prices and social unrest are jointly determined, data on natural disasters are used to identify the causal relationship flowing from food price levels to social unrest. Results indicate that for the period 1990–2011, food price increases have led to increases in social unrest, whereas food price volatility has not been associated with increases in social unrest. These results are robust to alternative definitions of social unrest, to using real or nominal prices, to using commodity-specific price indices instead of aggregated price indices, to alternative definitions of the instrumental variable, to alternative definitions of volatility, and to controlling for non-food-related social unrest.
Lower Oil Prices and the U.S. Economy BAUMEISTER, CHRISTIANE; KILIAN, LUTZ
Brookings papers on economic activity,
10/2016, Volume:
2016, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We explore the effect of the sharp and sustained decline after June 2014 in the global price of crude oil (and hence in the U.S. price of gasoline) on U.S. real GDP growth. Our analysis suggests that ...this decline produced a cumulative stimulus of about 0.9 percent of real GDP by raising private real consumption and non-oil-related business investment, and an additional stimulus of 0.04 percent, reflecting a shrinking petroleum trade deficit. This stimulative effect, however, has been largely offset by a large reduction in real investment by the oil sector. Hence, the net stimulus since June 2014 has been close to zero. We show that the U.S. economy’s response was not fundamentally different from that observed after the oil price decline of 1986. Then as now, the U.S. economy’s response is consistent with standard economic models of the transmission of oil price shocks. We find no evidence that frictions in reallocating capital and labor across sectors or increased uncertainty about the price of gasoline explain the sluggish response of U.S. real GDP growth. Nor do we find evidence of financial contagion, of spillovers from oil-related investment to non-oil-related investment, of an increase in household savings, or of households deleveraging.
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