Oil price shocks and economic growth: The volatility link

Abstract

This paper shows that oil shocks impact economic growth primarily through the conditional variance of growth. Our comparison of models focuses on density forecasts. Over a range of dynamic models, oil shock measures and data, we find a robust link between oil shocks and the volatility of economic growth. We then develop a new measure of oil shocks and show that it is superior to existing measures; it indicates that the conditional variance of growth increases in response to an indicator of the local maximum oil price exceedance. The empirical results uncover a large pronounced asymmetric response of the growth volatility to oil price changes. The uncertainty about future growth is considerably lower than with a benchmark AR(1) model when no oil shocks are present.