This dissertation studies two major topics related to the crude oil price and the economy. The first topic studied is about the relationship between speculation and the crude oil price and the related implications on the macroeconomic growth and inflation. The second topic is about the relationship between the oil price volatility and the US stock market. It includes two subtopics: i) the volatility spillovers between the crude oil market and the US stock market and ii) the relationship between oil price volatility and real stock returns on the US market. This dissertation has four chapters, with each of the two major topics studied relatively independently in their respective chapters. In the first chapter, we introduce the background and motivation for the topics studied in this dissertation. Additionally, we also give an overview of the results and important findings. In the second chapter, we examine the impact of speculative information on the oil price and the corresponding implications on the macroeconomy. We use a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model to decompose the shocks of the crude oil price and use the gold price as a proxy for the speculative information. We argue that using the gold price to account for speculative information is a very informative alternative to the other indicators used in literature. Our results show that speculative information plays a very important role in driving crude oil price shocks; it accounts for about 20% of the variation of the oil price. Furthermore, we show that speculative shocks to the crude oil price are correlated to future macroeconomic downturns. We also show that speculative shocks may create inflation pressure, although the effect is not as strong as that on the macroeconomic output growth. In the third chapter, we use a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) specification to model the volatility on both the oil and stock markets and then utilize an extension of the GARCH-M (GARCH in mean) vector autoregression (VAR) model introduced in Elder (2004) to capture the volatility spillover relationship between the two markets and the relationship between the volatility of the oil price and stock returns at the same time. Further, we detect a structural change of the oil price-stock returns relationship near the middle of 1987. A unidirectional volatility spillover from the stock market to the oil market is found to be statistically significant before the break, while a negative relationship between oil price volatility and the conditional mean of stock returns is more pronounced afterwards. We argue that several events happening around the break point are likely to be the causes for the structural change. In the last chapter, we summarize the work and highlight the important results in this dissertation. In addition, we also discuss possible future research directions.

The dissertation consists of three empirical studies and takes a closer look at price fluctuations using German gasoline prices as an example for a homogenous good. It analyzes consumers’ reaction to price fluctuations and respectively the pricing behavior of firms. The first paper, which was developed with co-authorship, explores consumers’ online price search effects on the pricing behavior of firms (gasoline price level and price dispersion). As regulators have recently implemented a mechanism for reporting all price changes to a central data base, the core assumption of this price reporting scheme is that the increase in price transparency will lead to a decline in the price level and a reduction in price dispersion. The second study addresses the question whether German gas stations adjust their retail prices asymmetrically in response to crude oil price changes, i.e., whether gas stations react quicker to crude oil price increases than to crude oil price decreases. The third study aims to analyze whether consumers react more strongly to gasoline price increases or to price decreases when considering buying a new vehicle.

Essays on Canadian and U.S. energy policies and demands.

As OPEC has loosened its grip over the past ten years, the oil market has been rocked by wild price swings, the likes of which haven't been seen for eight decades. Crafting an engrossing journey from the gushing Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s to today's fraught and fractious Middle East, Crude Volatility explains how past periods of stability and volatility in oil prices help us understand the new boom-bust era. Oil's notorious volatility has always been considered a scourge afflicting not only the oil industry but also the broader economy and geopolitical landscape; Robert McNally makes sense of how oil became so central to our world and why it is subject to such extreme price fluctuations. Tracing a history marked by conflict, intrigue, and extreme uncertainty, McNally shows how—even from the oil industry's first years—wild and harmful price volatility prompted industry leaders and officials to undertake extraordinary efforts to stabilize oil prices by controlling production. Herculean market interventions—first, by Rockefeller's Standard Oil, then, by U.S. state regulators in partnership with major international oil companies, and, finally, by OPEC—succeeded to varying degrees in taming the beast. McNally, a veteran oil market and policy expert, explains the consequences of the ebbing of OPEC's power, debunking myths and offering recommendations—including mistakes to avoid—as we confront the unwelcome return of boom and bust oil prices.

This paper investigates the response of consumer price inflation to changes in domestic fuel prices, looking at the different categories of the overall consumer price index (CPI). We then combine household survey data with the CPI components to construct a CPI index for the poorest and richest income quintiles with the view to assess the distributional impact of the pass-through. To undertake this analysis, the paper provides an update to the Global Monthly Retail Fuel Price Database, expanding the product coverage to premium and regular fuels, the time dimension to December 2020, and the sample to 190 countries. Three key findings stand out. First, the response of inflation to gasoline price shocks is smaller, but more persistent and broad-based in developing economies than in advanced economies. Second, we show that past studies using crude oil prices instead of retail fuel prices to estimate the pass-through to inflation significantly underestimate it. Third, while the purchasing power of all households declines as fuel prices increase, the distributional impact is progressive. But the progressivity phases out within 6 months after the shock in advanced economies, whereas it persists beyond a year in developing countries.