The Response of U.S. States to Exogenous Oil Supply and Monetary Policy Shocks

Purpose This paper examines how oil supply shocks and monetary policy actions jointly affect wage inequality in the US, with a particular focus on the role of education. The study addresses three key questions: (1) how exogenous oil supply shocks influence wage inequality, (2) how exogenous monetary policy shocks shape income distribution, and (3) whether these effects differ within and between education groups, revealing the role of human capital in amplifying or mitigating inequality. Design/methodology/approach The analysis uses quarterly US data from 2000 to 2021. Wage inequality is measured using the Theil index constructed from CPS/BLS weekly earnings of full-time workers aged 25 and above, allowing additive decomposition into within- and between-education components (high school, bachelor's and advanced degree). Identification relies on exogenous oil supply news shocks and exogenous monetary policy shocks. A vector autoregression (VAR) framework is estimated, and impulse response functions trace the dynamic effects of both shocks on inequality over a 10-quarter horizon. Findings The results show that overall wage inequality increased by about 15% over the sample period, with roughly 75% driven by within-education dispersion rather than differences across education levels. Oil supply shocks significantly raise wage inequality, increasing dispersion within high-school and advanced-degree groups and widening inequality between education groups. In contrast, contractionary monetary policy shocks compress wage inequality, with the strongest effects observed among advanced-degree earners and a reduction in between-education wage gaps. Research limitations/implications This study focuses exclusively on the US due to data availability at a quarterly frequency, which limits the generalizability of the findings to other economies with different labor market institutions and energy dependence. Wage inequality is measured using CPS/BLS data for full-time workers, excluding self-employed and part-time workers, who may experience different distributional effects. The analysis is confined to education-based groupings and does not account for other dimensions of inequality, such as race, gender or industry. Finally, while exogenous shock measures are used, the VAR framework captures average dynamic responses and may not fully reflect nonlinearities or structural changes across different economic regimes. Practical implications The findings show that macroeconomic policies have important distributional effects. Oil supply shocks significantly increase wage inequality, especially within high-school and advanced-degree groups, implying that energy price volatility can worsen income dispersion. Policies that reduce exposure to oil shocks—such as energy diversification and strategic reserves—may therefore also help limit inequality. Monetary policy, while aimed at stabilizing inflation and output, affects income distribution as well: contractionary shocks compress wage inequality, particularly among highly educated workers. Since most inequality arises within education groups, education alone is insufficient; complementary labor market and earnings-stabilization policies are needed to mitigate the unequal effects of macroeconomic shocks. Originality/value This study is among the first to jointly analyze oil supply shocks and monetary policy shocks using exogenous identification while decomposing wage inequality by education. By highlighting heterogeneous distributional responses across education groups, the paper provides new insights into how energy shocks and stabilization policies interact with human capital to shape income inequality.

The paper introduces a new measure that jointly identifies and disentangles the oil supply shocks of crude oil into exogenous and endogenous, by quantifying the positive and negative shocks to oil production caused by events outside the oil market (exogenous) or as a consequence of the normal functioning of the oil market (endogenous). The objective is to examine how the use of alternative measures of oil supply shocks affects our assessment of the dynamic effects of supply shocks on the real price of oil since 1990. Results show that for most of the 1990s, shortfalls in oil production that were brought about by geopolitical episodes accounted for about 7% of the variability in global crude oil production. However, this pattern reverses after 2000 onwards, as fluctuations in global oil production are largely attributed to market-specific events (6%). We show that oil supply shocks may have very different effects on the real price of oil, depending on the underlying specification of the shock. In particular, the measures that capture market-driven shifts in oil supply are found to be more plausible than the rest in explaining the variability of the real price of oil, especially when compared with flow supply shocks. In fact, analysis suggests that flow supply shocks underestimate the historical contribution of oil supply shocks to changes in the real price of oil, in contrast to total supply shocks that appear to have exerted significant upward pressure in the real price of oil especially between 2003 and mid-2008. Overall, endogenous supply shocks play an increasing important role in the historical evolution of the oil price, but it must be noted that oil price developments after 2010 are largely attributed to exogenous supply shocks. We conclude that historically the supply side of the market has been an important determinant of the real price of oil after all.

The existing literature on the impact of oil supply shocks on real economic activity after the mid-1980s still fails to reach an agreement. This may be partly due to different identification assumptions and model specifications corresponding to the oil supply shock, and partly due to the oil supply shock identified previously is endogenous to real economic activity. In this paper, based on the proxy structural vector autoregressions (SAVRs), we identify an oil supply shock that is exogenous to real economic activity, and then study the impact of this shock on U.S. real economic activity. We find exogenous oil supply shocks have a very large and persistent impact on U.S. real economic activity after the mid-1980s. Besides, several new possible transmission channels through which exogenous oil supply shocks can influence U.S. real GDP are detected. Specifically, unfavorable exogenous oil supply shocks can lower the consumer sentiment index (CSI) and consumer confidence index (CCI), decrease real net exports of goods and services (NEGS) through the terms of trade (TOT) effect, and reduce real government consumption expenditures and gross investment of state and local (GCEGISL), thus leading to a decline in real GDP. These newly detected transmission channels are very important for policymakers.

Exogenous oil supply shocks and global agricultural commodity prices: The role of biofuels

Inflation in the euro area has been falling steadily since early 2013 and at the end of 2014 turned negative. Part of the decline has been due to oil prices, but the weakness of aggregate demand has also played a significant role. This paper uses a VAR model to quantify the contribution of oil supply, aggregate demand and monetary policy shocks (identified by means of sign restrictions) on inflation in the euro area. The analysis suggests that in the last two years inflation has been driven down by all three factors, as the effective lower bound to policy rates has prevented the European Central Bank from reducing the short-term rates to support economic activity and align inflation with the definition of price stability. Remarkably, the joint contribution of monetary and demand shocks is at least as important as that of oil price developments to the deviation of inflation from its baseline. Country-by-country analysis shows that both aggregate demand and oil supply shocks have driven inflation down everywhere, albeit with varying intensity. The findings stand confirmed after a series of robustness checks.

Oil price can have influential effects on inflation as oil is used as the main source in many productions. In this paper, we perform comparative analyses on studying the impacts of oil price shocks on determining the domestic inflation in two groups of countries, i.e. oil importing versus oil exporting countries. In particular, we look into the effects of oil supply and oil demand shocks on determining the domestic inflation. A structural vector autoregressive model is used in analyzing the effects of orthogonalized shocks on inflation. A Blanchard-Quah identification is applied on the long-run impact matrix. We focus the analyses on ten oil importing and ten oil exporting countries respectively. The data ranging from 1973M1 onwards till 2015M1. Our results detect interaction effects among variables. We also observe that oil supply shock is more influential in explaining CPI inflation compared to oil demand shocks. Oil supply shock can be a determinant to inflation in oil importing countries but oil demand has very limited explanatory power on explaining inflation in most countries. Inflation in the main oil exporting countries does not respond to neither oil supply shock nor oil demand shock. The results reveal that oil dependency may determine the magnitude impact of oil supply and oil demand shocks on inflation.

Asymmetric influence of oil demand and supply shocks on meat commodities

This paper expands Kilian’s (2008) original time series of exogenous oil supply shocks along two dimensions. First, we extend the sample period to include production shortfalls in OPEC member states during 2004:10-2019:12. Second, we also consider production shortfalls in non-OPEC countries. Our extended time series of exogenous oil supply shocks displays statistically significant correlation with alternative estimates of oil supply shocks based on vector-autoregressive models. At the same time, it requires a limited number of assumptions about the counterfactual evolution of production in the countries under consideration and escapes thus the current debate about the validity of common identifying restrictions in multivariate structural models.

In light of the U.S. shale oil boom and given that commercial shale oil production has been mostly confined to the USA, this paper disentangles the oil supply determinant into its U.S. and non-U.S. production components, and studies their impact on U.S. real personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and on U.S. index of consumer sentiment (ICS). First, I estimate a structural VAR model to identify and study the effect of structural shocks in the crude oil market on PCE and ICS. The results show that while PCE and ICS respond negatively to oil demand shocks, they respond differently to oil supply shocks. While ICS experiences transitory negative response to both oil supply shocks, PCE shows that the response of inflation and output differs depending on whether the oil supply shock is domestic or foreign. Second, I compute the forecast-error-variance decompositions to quantify the contribution of oil supply and demand shocks to the historical fluctuations in PCE and ICS. My findings reveal that most of the variation in PCE is explained by oil supply shocks—unlike ICS where most of its variation is explained by aggregate demand shocks. Third, I conduct a historical decomposition exercise to examine the contributions of structural oil shocks in explaining historical changes in PCE and ICS. My results indicate a strong presence of U.S. oil supply shock in boosting ICS during the 2014 period of the oil price drop. Finally, the results that not all oil supply shocks are alike are robust to alternative measures of real economic activity.

The impact of oil price shocks on the U.S. stock market: A note on the roles of U.S. and non-U.S. oil production

Kilian and Park (IER 50 (2009), 1267-1287) find shocks to oil supply are relatively unimportant to understanding changes in U.S. stock returns. We examine the impact of both U.S. and non-U.S. oil supply shocks on U.S. stock returns in light of the unprecedented expansion in U.S. oil production since 2009. Our results underscore the importance of the disaggregation of world oil supply and of the recent extraordinary surge in the U.S. oil production for analysing impact on U.S. stock prices. A positive U.S. oil supply shock has a positive impact on U.S. real stock returns. Oil demand and supply shocks are of comparable importance in explaining U.S. real stock returns when supply shocks from U.S. and non-U.S. oil production are identified.

A comparison of the effects of exogenous shocks to global crude oil production on seven major industrialized economies suggests a fair degree of similarity in the real growth responses. An exogenous oil supply disruption typically causes a temporary reduction in real GDP growth that is concentrated in the second year after the shock. Inflation responses are more varied. The median CPI inflation response peaks after three to four quarters. Exogenous oil supply disruptions need not generate sustained inflation or stagflation. Typical responses include a fall in the real wage, higher short-term interest rates, and a depreciating currency with respect to the dollar. Despite many qualitative similarities, there is strong statistical evidence that the responses to exogenous oil supply disruptions differ across G7 countries. For suitable subsets of countries, homogeneity cannot be ruled out. A counterfactual historical exercise suggests that the evolution of CPI inflation in the G7 countries would have been similar overall to the actual path even in the absence of exogenous shocks to oil production, consistent with a monetary explanation of the inflation of the 1970s. There is no evidence that the 1973–1974 and 2002–2003 oil supply shocks had a substantial impact on real growth in any G7 country, whereas the 1978–1979, 1980, and 1990–1991 shocks contributed to lower growth in at least some G7 countries.

On the transmission of oil supply and demand shocks to CO2 emissions in the US by considering uncertainty: A time-varying perspective

This article takes the impact of international oil price shocks on China's economic growth as the research object, and studies the impact mechanism of international oil price shocks on China's economic development status, providing practical value for the formulation of relevant policies in China. This article selects monthly data from January 2007 to December 2023 as the research interval, and uses the SVAR model to decompose the changes in international oil prices into three different sources of structural oil supply and demand shocks, namely oil supply shocks, oil total demand shocks, and oil specific demand shocks. The research results show that overall, the impact of international oil price shocks on China's economic growth is relatively low. International oil price shocks will have a negative impact on China's economic growth, and the average contribution of the three structural oil supply and demand shocks to China's economic growth does not exceed 13.1%. The impact of specific oil demand shocks on China's economic growth is the greatest, followed by oil supply shocks and total oil demand shocks, which indirectly reflect that China's economic growth is mainly influenced by its own factors.

We compare the economic consequences of several types of oil shocks across a set of industrialized countries that are structurally very diverse with respect to the role of oil and other forms of energy in their economy. We find considerably different effects across countries, which crucially depend on the underlying source of the oil price shift. For oil demand shocks driven by global economic activity and oil-specific demand shocks, all countries experience respectively a temporary increase and transitory decline of real GDP following the oil price increase. The role of oil and other forms of energy seems not to matter to explain cross-country differences for the consequences of both shocks. This role, however, is very important to explain asymmetries in the effects of exogenous oil supply shocks. Whereas net oil and energy-importing countries all face a permanent fall in economic activity, the impact is insignificant or even positive in net energy-exporting countries. In addition, countries that improved their net energy-position the most over time, became less vulnerable to oil supply and oil-specific demand shocks, relative to other countries.