Low oil prices and rising oil imports have caused growing concern about U.S. vulnerability to oil-supply shocks. Mine K. Yucel and Carol Dahl devise a measure of vulnerability and use it to compare three policies that have been proposed to reduce U.S. vulnerability to oil-supply disruptions: a...

Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question “What is an oil shock?” and has concluded that oil-price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the US economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely, but sharp decreases in...

It's not the latest jump in oil prices that takes a toll on the economy but the uncertainty over what will happen in the future. But getting a handle on such uncertainty is a difficult task.

When oil prices jump, people get jumpy-especially when the Fed is bumping up interest rate targets at the same time. Why? Because these two events have accompanied virtually every recession since World War II. At least until now.

The relationship between oil price shocks and U.S. macroeconomic fluctuations advocated by Hamilton (1983) broke down in the 1980s amidst a new regime of highly volatile oil price movements. Several authors have argued that asymmetric and nonlinear transformations of oil prices restore that...