Electric Cars and Oil Prices

Jose Azar

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper studies the joint dynamics of oil prices and interest in electric cars, measured as the volume of Google searches for related phrases. Not surprisingly, I find that oil price shocks predict increases in Google searches for electric cars. Much more surprisingly, I also find that an increase in Google searches predicts declines in oil prices. The high level of public interest in electric cars between April and August of 2008 can explain approximately half of the decline in oil prices during the second half of 2008. These findings are significant because they show that oil markets respond to developments related to alternative technologies. I investigate several hypotheses explaining these results.

Keywords: Oil prices; crude oil; electric cars; electric vehicles; Google Trends; Google Insights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G1 Q4 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15538/1/MPRA_paper_15538.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:15538

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().