This paper studies the existence of risk premia in crude oil futures prices with simple regression and Bayesian VAR models. It also studies the importance of three main risk premia models in explaining and forecasting the risk premia in practice. Whilst the existence of the premia and the...

The price of oil has risen by about 60% since mid-2004 and by more than 40% since the beginning of 2005. Though the U.S. economy has apparently absorbed this supply shock well so far, the path of future oil prices remains a concern for monetary policymakers. Higher oil prices can damp demand, as...

Large movements in the oil price have had significant effects on UK CPI inflation over the past few years. In order to produce an inflation forecast, it is necessary to assume a path for oil and other commodity prices. The Monetary Policy Committee assumes that oil prices follow the path given...

If commercial producers or financial investors use futures contracts to hedge against commodity price risk, the arbitrageurs who take the other side of the contracts may receive compensation for their assumption of nondiversifiable risk in the form of positive expected returns from their...

If commercial producers or financial investors use futures contracts to hedge against commodity price risk, the arbitrageurs who take the other side of the contracts may receive compensation for their assumption of non-diversifiable risk in the form of positive expected returns from their...

This paper addresses the question of whether the oil price spike of 2003-2008 was a bubble. We document and discuss what is known about the level of speculation in the paper oil market. We then analyze the dynamics of the term structure of futures prices, both during the earlier period of...

We assess the transmission of monetary policy shocks on oil prices using a VAR model. We identify monetary policy and financial activity shocks disentangled from demand and oil supply shocks using sign restrictions. We obtain the following main findings. (i) Monetary policy and financial...