How Does the Oil Price Shock Affect Consumers?

This paper evaluates the degree of the pass-through effect of the oil price shock using disaggregated CPIs in the US. We find a significantly positive effect of the oil price shock only on energy-intensive CPIs, which imply that the strong pass-through effect on the total CPI is mainly driven by substantial increases in prices of energy-related commodities. Unexpected changes in the oil price may result in decreases in the budget for non-energy commodities, if the demand for energy is inelastic (Edelstein and Kilian, 2009). Decreases in the demand for non-energy commodities will then result in limited pass-through effects on prices of those goods, which is consistent with our empirical findings.