The extraordinary oil price volatility of the 2007-08 period has resulted in special attention being focused on the role of financial market factors in determining physical oil prices. We survey the literature to assess the state of research on this topic. The literature provides substantial...

We review and synthesize the empirical evidence on several factors related to petroleum product prices: (1) the general distributional characteristics of petroleum product prices; (2) the influence of refinery outages, extreme weather, and similar circumstances on product prices; (3) the way...

We review a large body of the empirical literature focusing on the relation between petroleum product prices and oil prices and discuss the evidence on the direction of causality between crude oil prices and petroleum product prices. In addition, we survey the literature on the much-debated...

We extend the Limits to Arbitrage literature by studying how physical constraints affect financial arbitrage in commodity markets. Using the U.S. crude oil market as our experimental setting, we document substantial economically significant violations of the no-arbitrage futures pricing...

We study the dynamics of cash-and-carry arbitrage using the U.S. crude oil market. Sizable arbitrage-related inventory movements occur at the NYMEX futures contract delivery point but not at other storage locations where, instead, operational factors explain most inventory changes. We add to the...

We study the dynamics of cash-and-carry arbitrage using the U.S. crude oil market. Sizable arbitrage-related inventory movements occur at the NYMEX futures contract delivery point but not at other storage locations where, instead, operational factors explain most inventory changes. We add to the...