What if Oil was Less Substitutable?

Verónica Acurio Vásconez

Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg

Abstract: The consequences of oil price shocks in the real economy have preoccupied economists since the 1970s and the absence of a reaction has stunned them in the 2000s. However, despite the huge literature devoted to the subject, no dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (dsge) model has been able to capture, all at the same time, four of the well-known stylized effects observed after the oil price increase of the 2000s: the absence of recession, coupled with a low but persistent increase in the inflation rate, a decrease in real wages and low price elasticity of oil demand in the short run. One of the reasons is that theoretical papers assume a high degree of substitutability between oil and other factors, an assumption that is not backed up empirically. This paper enlarges the dsge model developed in Acurio-Vásconez et al. (2015) by introducing imperfect substitutability between oil and other factors. The Bayesian estimation of the model over the period 1984:Q1-2007:Q3 suggests that the elasticities of substitution of oil are 0.086 in production and 0.014 in consumption. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis of the estimated model points towards two main policy conclusions: (a) a stronger anti-inflationary Taylor rule can lead to a recession after an oil shock and; (b) wage flexibility could create a stronger increase in inflation and provoke a decrease in domestic consumption. This latter result contradicts the conclusions of Blanchard and Galí (2009) and Blanchard and Riggi (2013).

Keywords: New-Keynesian model; dsge; oil; ces; stickiness; oil substitution. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D58 E32 E52 Q43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-ene and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://beta.u-strasbg.fr/WP/2020/2020-08.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2020-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).