skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Sensitivity of the U.S. economy to oil prices controlling for domestic production and imports

Journal Article · · Energy Economics

This paper investigates the sensitivity of U.S. economic performance to oil price changes, accounting for changes in the domestic petroleum supply-demand balance over the last decade. Herein, a non-linear (asymmetric) autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model is used to estimate the U.S. GDP elasticity with respect to the oil price, controlling for oil production, consumption and imports, and macroeconomic variables. The positive and negative components of the oil price both have statistically significant long-run impacts on the real U.S. GDP. The parameter estimates imply that a 1% positive and permanent oil price shock, all else the same, would have a long-run impact of –0.045% on the U.S. economy (an elasticity of –0.045), but short-run parameters on the positive oil price terms are not significant at the 10% level. The long-run parameter on the negative oil price component term implies an elasticity of –0.034. Thus, controlling for domestic U.S. oil production and oil trade, the long-run oil price elasticity of the U.S. GDP remains within the range of estimates from previous studies. The results also show that domestic oil production and consumption have short-run impacts on the U.S. GDP. The potential extent of interactions among these variables, and implications for the net economic impacts, under an oil price shock are subjects of future research.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Fossil Energy (FE)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1959636
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1895163
Journal Information:
Energy Economics, Vol. 115, Issue 1; ISSN 0140-9883
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (24)

Lifting the US crude oil export ban: A numerical partial equilibrium analysis journal October 2016
Oil price shocks and policy uncertainty: New evidence on the effects of US and non-US oil production journal August 2017
OPEC vs US shale: Analyzing the shift to a market-share strategy journal March 2017
On the link between current account and oil price fluctuations in diversified economies: The case of Canada journal December 2017
Comparisons of various types of normality tests journal December 2011
Review of key international demand elasticities for major industrializing economies journal October 2019
Some recent development in a concept of causality journal September 1988
Testing the null hypothesis of stationarity against the alternative of a unit root journal October 1992
Oil prices, inflation and interest rates in a structural cointegrated VAR model for the G-7 countries journal May 2008
Explanations for the 2014 oil price decline: Supply or demand? journal August 2018
Is the Discretionary Income Effect of Oil Price Shocks a Hoax? journal September 2018
Modeling fluctuations in the global demand for commodities journal November 2018
Impacts of oil price shocks on the United States economy: A meta-analysis of the oil price elasticity of GDP for net oil-importing economies journal April 2018
Lower Oil Prices and the U.S. Economy: Is This Time Different? journal January 2016
Output and inflation in the long run journal January 2001
Oil Price Shocks: Causes and Consequences journal November 2014
Bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal January 2001
Further Evidence on the Great Crash, the Oil-Price Shock, and the Unit-Root Hypothesis journal January 2002
Computation and analysis of multiple structural change models journal January 2003
The Unconventional Oil Supply Boom: Aggregate Price Response from Microdata journal July 2019
How sensitive are consumer expenditures to retail energy prices? journal September 2009
Comments and Discussion journal January 2016
Testing for a unit root in time series regression journal January 1988
Bootstrapping the autoregressive distributed lag test for cointegration journal August 2017