This paper examines the advantages and drawbacks of alternative methods of estimating oil supply and oil demand elasticities and of incorporating this information into structural VAR models. I not only summarize the state of the literature, but also draw attention to a number of econometric...

Oil market VAR models have become the standard tool for understanding the evolution of the real price of oil and its impact in the macro economy. As this literature has expanded at a rapid pace, it has become increasingly difficult for mainstream economists to understand the differences between...

Baumeister and Hamilton (2019a) assert that every critique of their work on oil markets by Kilian and Zhou (2019a) is without merit. In addition, they make the case that key aspects of the economic and econometric analysis in the widely used oil market model of Kilian and Murphy (2014) and its...

Since the recovery from the great financial crisis in 2010, global real trade flows grew much slower than pre-crisis, in both absolute terms (growth rates) and relative terms (relative to GDP, from 2:1 in the great 1990’s to 1:1 since 2012) A debate has arisen as to whether this global trade...

Trade costs are crucial in new economic geography (NEG) models. The unavailability of actual trade costs data requires the approximation of trade costs. Most NEG studies do not deal with the ramifications of the particular trade costs specification used. This paper shows that the specification...

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

We propose a new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand that exploits systematic differences across U.S. states in the pass-through of oil price shocks to retail gasoline prices. We show that these differences are primarily driven by the cost of producing and...

There has been much interest in the relationship between the price of crude oil, the value of the U.S. dollar, and the U.S. interest rate since the 1980s. For example, the sustained surge in the real price of oil in the 2000s is often attributed to the declining real value of the U.S. dollar as...