Category Archives: energy

Do you see what I see?

I’m still looking for, and still not seeing, the economic recovery that everybody is talking about.

Supply, demand, and the price of oil

Do recently rising oil prices signal a resurgence of economic growth?

Link to JEC video

The Joint Economic Committee has now posted a video of yesterday’s hearing on oil and the economy. My statement starts at about 11 minutes.

Rising world oil demand and the U.S. economy

This morning, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress took up the implications of rising world oil demand for the U.S. economy. I was invited to participate along with Daniel Yergin, Co-Founder and Chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

I have some more discussion at the Washington Post as well as the following links:

Oil shocks and recessions

Here I provide some more background on the relation between oil price increases and economic recessions.

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Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08

In a follow-up on my earlier post, I’d now like to discuss the second part of my paper, Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08, which I presented today at a conference at the Brookings Institution. Here I’ll review the role that the oil price shock may have played in causing the economic recession that began in 2007:Q4.

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Causes of the Oil Shock of 2007-08

I will be presenting my latest research paper, Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08, at a conference today at the Brookings Institution. Here I review some results from that paper about what caused oil prices to rise so spectacularly in 2007-08 only to decline even more dramatically afterward.

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December auto sales

On a seasonally adjusted basis, U.S. light vehicle sales remained deeply depressed in December. But at least things don’t seem to be any worse than they had been the previous month.

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The oil shock and recession of 2008: Part 2

In my previous post, I presented evidence that the oil price increase over 2007:H2-2008:H1 made a significant contribution to the slowdown in consumption spending in general and decline in spending on domestic automobiles in particular. Here I discuss why this should be regarded as a key development that turned the slowdown in growth into a recession.

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The oil shock and recession of 2008: Part 1

This is the first in what I’m planning will be a series of posts discussing the contribution that the energy price spike of 2008 made to our present economic difficulties. In this first installment, I revisit a very interesting research paper on the response of consumer spending to energy price increases written by Lutz Kilian (Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan), and Paul Edelstein (Senior Economist for Decision Economics). I first brought this paper to the attention of Econbrowser readers in the spring of 2007. I thought now would be a good time to take a look at how well the equations in Edelstein and Kilian’s paper can describe what we saw happen in the later part of 2007 and first half of 2008.

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