Response pattern of stock returns to international oil price shocks: From the perspective of China’s oil industrial chain

Abstract

Based on a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model, this paper decomposes oil price changes into four components: oil supply shocks, global demand shocks, domestic demand shocks and precautionary demand shocks. Then, this paper investigates the impacts of these oil price shocks on the stock returns of China’s listed companies in the oil industrial chain using data from 2009 to 2014. The empirical results show that the returns of the listed companies in the whole oil industrial chain benefit from appreciation in the oil price, the impacts of oil supply shocks and precautionary demand shocks are the most significant, and there is a structural change in the impacts of oil price shocks in 2012. Among the four oil price shocks, the impacts of oil supply shocks and precautionary demand shocks are the most significant. Moreover, there is a gradual increase in the aggregate contributions of oil price shocks to the changes in stock returns. A robustness check with different global crude oil prices and a different industry classification standard confirms that the above empirical results are robust. The empirical results of the paper imply that stock investors, oil-related companies and the government need pay close attention to sudden changes that may affect current and future oil availability and pay greater attention to the stocks at the two ends of the oil industrial chain.