The question is examined whether OPEC is in a position to collect a risk premium to effectively insure others against a macroeconomic downturn, which may, in turn, result from a rise in the price of crude oil. Contingent exchange is modeled such that parties whose consumption is elastic with...

We show that statistical tests of OPEC behavior have very low power across a wide range of alternative hypotheses regarding market structure. Consequently, it is difficult, given the current availability and precision of data on demand and costs, to distinguish collusive from competitive...

The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...