The outbreak of COVID-19 and the wide-ranging measures needed to slow its advance triggered an unprecedented collapse in oil demand, a surge in oil inventories, and a record one-month decline in oil prices in March 2020. This paper examines the likely implications of the 2020 oil price plunge...

This paper explores the effect of oil shocks on electoral outcomes. Using a new polling and election data set for 207 elections across 50 democracies, the paper shows that oil price increases systematically lower the odds of reelection for incumbents. The analysis verifies that these shocks -...

The COVID-19-triggered collapse in oil prices in March and April 2020 was the seventh, and by far the most severe, in a series of such collapses since 1970. This paper, first, compares this most recent collapse and its drivers with previous ones in an event study. It finds that it was associated...

With the benefit of hindsight, this paper provides a fresh and comprehensive look at the causes of the 2014-16 collapse in oil prices and its impact on the global economy. It disentangles the contribution of supply and demand factors, assesses the impact on activity in oil exporters and oil...

The paper deals with the economics of sustainability associated with the transformation of energy markets. It emphasizes the interrelations between technical changes and energy markets and how in turn the resulting transformations alter the sustainability of economic systems that are dependent...

This paper investigates the causal impact of oil price fluctuations on financial markets since January 2014. Following a heteroscedasticity-based event study approach, the paper instruments changes in oil prices by exogenous shocks in oil supply. It finds that oil price declines raise...

The decline in international oil prices over the past two years has resulted into an economic crisis in the Republic of Congo that could forestall the transformation efforts to move the country towards higher middle income status. A key strategy that government has pursued in recent years has...

This paper presents a comprehensive cross-country database of fiscal space, broadly defined as the availability of budgetary resources for a government to service its financial obligations. The database covers up to 200 countries over the period 1990-2016, and includes 28 indicators of fiscal...

This paper presents a procedure to construct an asymmetric fan chart of risks around global growth forecasts. The distribution of risks around global growth forecasts is estimated by weighting information extracted from option pricing and survey-based measures of risk factors of global growth....

Iraq was plunged into two simultaneous crises in the second half of 2014, one driven by a sharp decline in oil prices, the other, by Islamic State militants. Since June 2014, crude oil prices per barrel have fallen from around 112 USD to 97 USD in September and 62 USD by December. Given Iraq's...