Oil price shocks, firm uncertainty and investment

Kiseok Lee, Wensheng Kang, Ronald A. Ratti

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paperpeer-review

    Abstract

    The intuition in this paper is that an oil price shock has a greater effect on delaying a firm's investment the greater the uncertainty faced by that firm. A rise in the composite variable of oil price shock and firm uncertainty significantly delays investment. While growth in real oil price is not significant, the time-varying individual firm's stock price volatility identified with oil price shock dates is highly significant. Among 12 measures, the uncertainty measure obtained by multiplying an indicator function, that takes 1 if Hamilton (1996) type oil price shock is greater than 0 and 0 otherwise, to a firm's stock price volatility provides the largest absolute t-values in investment equations. A rise in firm uncertainty decreases both short- and long-run firm investment, indicating that oil price shocks affect the U.S. economy because they identify important geopolitical or economic events that have significant implications for the future U.S. economy.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 39th Australian Conference of Economists (ACE10), Sydney, Australia, 27-29 September 2010
    PublisherEconomics Society of Australia
    Number of pages43
    Publication statusPublished - 2010
    EventAustralian Conference of Economists -
    Duration: 8 Jul 2012 → …

    Conference

    ConferenceAustralian Conference of Economists
    Period8/07/12 → …

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