This paper surveys the history of the oil industry with a particular focus on the events associated with significant changes in the price of oil. Although oil was used much differently and was substantially less important economically in the nineteenth century than it is today, there are...

The main thrust of this report is the development of a price record that would provide a basis for the identification of the areas of activity in the oil industry in which significant price changes have occurred, with expectation that this type of information could serve as a useful ingredient...

Retail petroleum markets in Mexico are on the cusp of a historic deregulation. For decades, all 11,000 gasoline stations nationwide have carried the brand of the state-owned petroleum company Pemex and sold Pemex gasoline at federally regulated retail prices. This industry structure is changing,...

We use a new micro data set to estimate a stochastic industry-equilibrium model of the oil industry. This effort is a first step towards studying the importance of ongoing structural changes in the oil market in a general-equilibrium model of the world economy. We analyze the impact of the...

We test for changes in price behavior in the longest crude oil price series available (1861-2008). We find strong evidence for changes in persistence and in volatility of price across three well defined periods. We argue that historically, the real price of oil has tended to be highly persistent...

Tax expenditures are a major source of support for energy related activities in the federal budget exceeding direct budget support for energy by a factor of nearly six. Focusing on the policy goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum consumption, I find these tax expenditures...

While the underlying methodologies continue to be widely debated and refined, there is little consensus on how to assess the equilibrium exchange rate of economies dominated by production of finite natural resources such as the oil economies of the Middle East. In part this is due to the...

This Selected Issues paper for India reports that rapid growth is presenting new challenges to macroeconomic policy, although ensuring the sustainability of this growth requires broad-based fiscal and structural reforms. Higher world oil prices present risks in both the near and medium term. In...

This Selected Issues paper assesses the distributional effects of increased fuel prices on Mali. The paper applies cointegration analysis to simulate the evolution of Mali’s long-term equilibrium real exchange rate during the period 1982–2004. It assesses the impact of structural...

We derive non-cooperative Nash equilibrium (NE) importer and exporter petroleum excise taxes given full within-group tax coordination, but no coordination between groups, assuming that importers do not produce and exporters do not consume petroleum, and petroleum consumption causes a global...