The relationship between the price of oil and the level of economic activity is a fundamental empirical issue in macroeconomics. Hamilton (1983) showed that oil prices had significant predictive content for real economic activity in the United States prior to 1972, whereas Hooker (1996) argued that the estimated linear relations between oil prices and economic activity appear much weaker after 1973. In the debate that followed, several authors suggested that the apparent weakening of the relationship between oil prices and economic activity is illusory, arguing that the true relationship between oil prices and real economic activity is asymmetric, with the correlation between oil price decreases and output significantly different from the correlation between oil price increases and output—see, for example, Mork (1989) and Hamilton (2003).

It is customary to suggest that the asymmetry in the transmission of oil price shocks to real output is well established. Much of the empirical work cited as being in support of asymmetry, however, has not directly tested the hypothesis of an asymmetric transmission of oil price innovations. Moreover, many of the papers quantifying these asymmetric responses are based on censored oil price VAR models that have recently been shown to be invalid. Other studies are based on dynamic correlations in the data and do not distinguish between cause and effect. Recently, several new methods of testing and quantifying asymmetric responses of U.S. real economic activity to positive and negative oil price innovations have been developed. We put this literature into perspective, contrast it with more traditional approaches, highlight directions for further research, and reconcile some seemingly conflicting results reported in the literature.

This paper reviews some of the literature on the macroeconomic effects of oil price shocks with a particular focus on possible nonlinearities in the relation and recent new results obtained by Kilian and Vigfusson [http://www-personal.umich/~lkilian/kvsubmission.pdf (2009)].

Previous research shows that volatility in oil prices has tended to depress output, as measured by nonresidential investment and GDP. This is interpreted as evidence in support of the theory of real options in capital budgeting decisions, which predicts that uncertainty about, for example, commodity prices will cause firms to delay production and investment. We continue that investigation by analyzing the effect of oil price uncertainty on monthly measures of U.S. firm production related to industries in mining, manufacturing, and utilities. We use a more general specification, an updated sample that includes the increased oil price volatility since 2008, and we control for other nonlinear measures of oil prices. We find additional empirical evidence in support of the predictions of real options theory, and our results indicate that the extreme volatility in oil prices observed in 2008 and 2009 contributed to the severity of the decline in manufacturing activity.

We examine how future real GDP growth relates to changes in the forecasted long-term average of discounted real oil prices and to changes in unanticipated fluctuations of real oil prices around the forecasts. Forecasts are conducted using a state-space oil market model, in which global real economic activity and real oil prices share a common stochastic trend. Changes in unanticipated fluctuations and changes in the forecasted long-term average of discounted real oil prices sum to real oil price changes. We find that these two components have distinctly different relationships with future real GDP growth. Positive and negative changes in the unanticipated fluctuations of real oil prices correlate with asymmetric responses of future real GDP growth. In comparison, changes in the forecasted long-term average are smaller in magnitude but are more influential on real GDP. Persistent upward revisions of forecasts in the 2000s had a substantial negative impact on real GDP growth, according to our estimates.

This paper seeks to answer the following questions: Do oil price shocks affect firms' investment decisions? Do oil price shocks affect investment decisions differentially depending on firm-specific uncertainty? Over what time horizon do oil price shocks affect high-uncertainty firms? Is the intensity of the oil price shock important, or just its existence? It is found that oil price shocks depress firms' investment decisions, and do so differentially by depressing investment more for more uncertain firms. Oil shocks affect investment for at least the first and second year after the shock. In the short term, the mere existence of a shock drives most of the effect. In the long term, the intensity of the oil shock is also important. Bloom, Bond, and Van Reenan's result [Review of Economic Studies 74, 391–415 (2007)] regarding responsiveness to demand shocks being eroded at more uncertain firms for data on U.K. firms is replicated using data on U.S. firms and persists after oil shocks are considered.

In this paper we investigate the effects of oil price uncertainty and its asymmetry on real economic activity in the United States, in the context of a bivariate vector autoregression with GARCH-in-mean errors. The model allows for the possibilities of spillovers and asymmetries in the variance–covariance structure for real output growth and the change in the real price of oil. Our measure of oil price uncertainty is the conditional variance of the oil price–change forecast error. We isolate the effects of volatility in the change in the price of oil and its asymmetry on output growth and employ simulation methods to calculate generalized impulse response functions and volatility impulse response functions to trace the effects of independent shocks on the conditional means and the conditional variances, respectively, of the variables. We find that oil price uncertainty has a negative effect on output, and that shocks to the price of oil and its uncertainty have asymmetric effects on output.

This paper tests the three leading specifications of asymmetric and possibly nonlinear feedback from the real price of oil to U.S. industrial production and its sectoral components. We show that the evidence for such feedback is sensitive to the estimation period. Support for a nonlinear model is strongest for samples starting before 1973. Instead, using post-1973 data only, the evidence against symmetry becomes considerably weaker. For example, at the aggregate level, there is no evidence against the hypothesis of symmetric responses to oil price innovations of typical magnitude, consistent with results of Kilian and Vigfusson [Quantitative Economics, 2(3), 419–453 (2011)] for U.S. real GDP. There is strong evidence of asymmetries at the disaggregate level, however, especially for industries that are energy-intensive in production (such as chemicals) or that produce goods that are energy-intensive in use (such as transportation equipment). Our analysis suggests that these asymmetries may be obscured in the aggregate data and highlights the importance of developing multisector models of the transmission of oil price shocks.

Oil prices rose sharply prior to the onset of the 2007–2009 recession. Hamilton [in the Palgrave Dictionary of Macroeconomics (2008)] noted that nine of the last ten recessions in the United States were preceded by a substantial increases in the price of oil. In this paper, we consider whether oil price shocks significantly increase the probability of recessions in a number of countries. Because business cycle turning points generally are not available for other countries, we estimate the turning points together with oil's effect in a Markov-switching model with time-varying transition probabilities. We find that, for most countries, oil shocks do affect the likelihood of entering a recession. In particular, for a constant, zero-term spread, an average-sized shock to WTI oil prices increases the probability of recession in the United States by nearly 50 percentage points after one year and nearly 90 percentage points after two years.