Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

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...

Increasing oil security represents one of the most important policy actions, especially within IEA countries. Short and long term mechanisms could help such goal. On the short term side, revision of IEA emergency response oil stock system has been discussed. The attention is mainly focused on...

The weekly release of the U.S. inventory level by the DOE-EIA is known as the market mover in the U.S. oil futures market and to be a significant piece of information for all world oil markets in which the WTI is a price benchmark. We uncover suspicious trading patterns in the WTI futures...

This paper provides an analysis of the link between the global market for crude oil and oil futures risk premium at the aggregate level. It off ers empirical evidence on whether the compensation for risk required by the speculators depends on the type of the structural shock of interest....

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...

This paper evaluates the predictability of WTI light sweet crude oil futures by using the variance risk premium, i.e. the difference between model-free measures of implied and realized volatilities. Additional regressors known for their ability to explain crude oil futures prices are also...