Using time-varying BVARs, we find that oil price increases caused by oil supply shocks did not affect food commodity prices before the start of the millennium, but had positive spillover effects in more recent periods. Likewise, shortfalls in global food commodity supply--resulting from bad...

Following four years of relative stability at around $105 per barrel, oil prices have declined sharply since June 2014. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the sources of the recent decline in prices, and examines its macroeconomic, financial and policy implications. The recent drop...

The role of speculators in the oil markets has been vastly investigated during the last few years. Several authors focused on the definition of speculation while others examined the relationship between oil prices and the behavior of trading actors. In this paper, we formulate a new theory able...

Information on economic policy uncertainty (EPU) does matter in predicting oil returns especially when accounting for omitted nonlinearities in the relationship between these two variables via a time-varying coefficient approach. In this work, we compare the forecastability of standard, Bayesian...

We assess the transmission of monetary policy shocks on oil prices using a VAR model. We identify monetary policy and financial activity shocks disentangled from demand and oil supply shocks using sign restrictions. We obtain the following main findings. (i) Monetary policy and financial...

Can U.S. shale producers be regarded as the new swing producers in the crude oil markets? This brief paper will address this question from both a physical-oil-market standpoint and from an energy-financing standpoint. The article will conclude that basically the answer is no unless one adopts a...

This paper provides an analysis of the link between the global market for crude oil and oil futures risk premium at the aggregate level. It offers empirical evidence on whether the compensation for risk required by the speculators depends on the type of the structural shock of interest....

This paper uses a new empirical strategy to identify oil supply news shocks within a Non-Causal VAR model of standard global oil market variables. These shocks explain most of the movements in oil production over a long but finite time horizon. Our findings highlight the prominent role of...

This study analyses oil price movements through the lens of an agnostic random forest model, which is based on 1,000 regression trees. It shows that this highly disciplined, yet flexible computational model reduces in-sample root mean square errors (RMSEs) by 65% relative to a standard linear...