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...

After opening up of the Interconnector, the liberalized UK natural gas market and the regulated Continental gas markets became physically integrated. The oil-linked Continental gas price became dominant, due to both the large volume of the Continental market and to the fact that the significant...