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...