Saturday, January 15, 2011

Hamilton: Historical Oil Shocks

Here is a summary from Jim Hamilton of a new paper "Historical Oil Shocks" including a nice table of all post WW-II oil shocks: Oil shocks and economic recessions

And his conclusion:
The correlation between oil shocks and economic recessions appears to be too strong to be just a coincidence (Hamilton, 1983a, 1985). ... This is not to claim that the oil price increases themselves were the sole cause of most postwar recessions. Instead the indicated conclusion is that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some postwar recessions.
With rising oil prices, this is a timely paper.

Note: Here is the Schedule for Week of January 16th