The Elephant in the Ground: Managing Oil and Sovereign Wealth

Oil exporters typically do not consider below-ground assets when allocating their sovereign wealth fund portfolios, and ignore above-ground assets when extracting oil. We present a unified framework for considering both. Subsoil oil should alter a fund’s portfolio through additional leverage and hedging. First-best spending should be a share of total wealth, and any unhedged volatility must be managed by precautionary savings. If oil prices are pro-cyclical, oil should be extracted faster than the Hotelling rule to generate a risk premium on oil wealth. We then discuss how the management of Norway’s fund can practically be improved with our analysis.