《Forty Years of Oil Price Fluctuations: Why the Price of Oil May Still Surprise Us》

此篇论文发表在2016年Journal of Economic Perspective上。 作者讨论了在过去四十年中决定石油价格主要因素，以及石油价格难以预测的主要原因。

简介

It has been 40 years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent years, a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations hasemerged. Drawing on this literature, we first provide an overview of the causes of all major oil price fluctuations between 1973 and 2014. We then discuss why oil price fluctuations remain difficult to predict, despite economists' improved understanding of oil markets. Unexpected oil pricefluctuations are commonly referred to as oil price shocks. We document that, in practice, consumers, policymakers, financial market participants, and economists may have different oil price expectations, and that, what may be surprising to some, need not be equally surprising to others.