No abstract

Important interaction has been established for US economic policy uncertainty with a number of economic and financial variables including oil prices. This paper examines the dynamic effects of US and non-US oil production shocks on economic policy uncertainty using a structural VAR model. Such an examination is motivated by the substantial increases in US oil production in recent years with implications for US political and economic security. Positive innovations in US oil production are associated with decreases in US economic policy uncertainty. The economic forecast interquartile ranges about the US CPI and about federal/state/local government expenditures are particularly sensitive to innovations in US oil supply shocks. Shocks to US oil supply disruption causes rises in the CPI forecast uncertainty and accounts for 21% of the overall variation of the CPI forecaster disagreement. Dis-aggregation of oil production shocks into US and non-US oil production yield novel results. Oil supply shocks identified by US and non-US origins explain as much of the variation in economic policy uncertainty as structural shocks on the demand side of the oil market.JEL classification: E44, G12, Q43

Kilian and Park (IER 50 (2009), 1267-1287) find shocks to oil supply are relatively unimportant to understanding changes in U.S. stock returns. We examine the impact of both U.S. and non-U.S. oil supply shocks on stock returns in light of the unprecedented expansion in U.S. oil production since 2009. Our results underscore the importance of the disaggregation of world oil supply and of the recent extraordinary surge in the U.S. oil production for analysing impact on U.S. stock prices. We also show that stock returns respond very differently at the industrial level to non-U.S. and U.S. oil supply shocks.