Beginning in early 2011, crude oil production in the U.S. Midwest and Canada surpassed the pipeline capacity to transport it to the Gulf Coast where it could access the world oil market. As a result, the U.S. "benchmark" crude oil price in Cushing, Oklahoma, declined substantially relative to...

Technological innovations in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have enabled tremendous amounts of natural gas to be extracted profitably from underground shale formations that were long thought to be uneconomical. In this paper, we provide the first estimates of broad-scale welfare...

Despite widespread application of real options theory in the literature, the extent to which firms actually delay irreversible investments following an increase in the uncertainty of their environment is not empirically well-known. This paper estimates firms' responsiveness to changes in...

The mothballing option has been studied in the literature, but mainly in decision theoretic frameworks. This paper looks at it from a strategic point of view and applies it to an incumbent-entrant framework. In particular, based on the recent strategic interactions between OPEC and the shale oil...

This article studies the likely impact of unconventional gas developments in the U.S. on EU competitiveness. We find, first of all, little evidence for a prosperous unconventional gas development in Europe. Second, the U.S. boom has already a strong impact on both world and European energy...

A direct consequence of imposing a ceiling on the price of a good for which secondary markets do not exist, is that, when there is excess demand, the good will not be allocated to the buyers who value it the most. The resulting allocative cost has been discussed in the literature as a...

The security of energy supply is a key geopolitical factor in the relationship between the European Union and the southern neighborhood countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. We study the response of eight Mediterranean economies to exogenous oil supply shocks. We focus on the...

This paper is the first to assess operational and probabilistic externalities of oil extraction and transportation to Europe on the basis of a comprehensive evaluation of realistic future oil demand-supply scenarios, of the relative relevance of import routes, of the local specificities in terms...

In this work, we propose an analysis of the global market for crude oil based on a revised version of the Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model introduced by Kilian and Murphy (2014). On this respect, we replace the global proxy for above-ground crude oil inventories with the oil...