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This paper studies the investment decisions by oil and gas companies operating on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. We account for the heterogeneity across the fields by including field-specific variables, including geological and geographical variables. We find that the most important factors influencing the investment decisions are the size of the oil and gas reserves, geological variables, and the price of oil. The effect of oil price volatility is insignificant.

We examine the impact of political risks and financial development on investments in the petroleum industry utilizing a unique dataset of investments in individual oil and gas fields around the world. We find that the expected time to investment is shorter in countries that are politically stable, have solid property rights protection and more developed financial systems. Political risks have the strongest impact on multinational companies, whereas financial development matters only for domestic national oil companies. At the company level we find that expected time to investment is shorter for companies with higher valuation and lower debt. Moreover, companies are more likely to invest in countries where they invested recently and less likely to invest in countries where their competitors invested recently.

This paper studies the investment decisions by oil and gas companies operating on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. We account for the heterogeneity across the fields by including field-specific variables, including geological and geographical variables. We find that the most important factors influencing the investment decisions are the size of the oil and gas reserves, geological variables, and the price of oil. The effect of oil price volatility is insignificant.

No abstract