Staff research

Cost Pass-Through with Capacity Constraints and International Linkages

How are regional cost shocks passed through into global prices? We investigate the role of short-run capacity constraints and show that they can induce stark non-linearities in the pass-through. We highlight this effect for the market for ammonia, a commodity produced largely from natural gas.

Are Temporary Oil Supply Shocks Real?

Staff working paper 2022-52 Johan Brannlund, Geoffrey R. Dunbar, Reinhard Ellwanger
Hurricanes disrupt oil production in the Gulf of Mexico because producers shut in oil platforms to safeguard lives and prevent damage. We examine the effects of these temporary oil supply shocks on real economic activity in the United States.

Weather the Storms? Hurricanes, Technology and Oil Production

Do technological improvements mitigate the potential damages from extreme weather events? We show that hurricanes lower offshore oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and that stronger storms have larger impacts. Regulations enacted in 1980 that required improved offshore construction standards only modestly mitigated the production losses.

The New Benchmark for Forecasts of the Real Price of Crude Oil

How can we assess the quality of a forecast? We propose a new benchmark to evaluate forecasts of temporally aggregated series and show that the real price of oil is more difficult to predict than we thought.

The Effect of Oil Price Shocks on Asset Markets: Evidence from Oil Inventory News

Staff working paper 2020-8 Ron Alquist, Reinhard Ellwanger, Jianjian Jin
We quantify the reaction of U.S. equity, bond futures, and exchange rate returns to oil price shocks driven by oil inventory news.

The Simple Economics of Global Fuel Consumption

Staff working paper 2019-35 Doga Bilgin, Reinhard Ellwanger
This paper presents a structural framework of the global oil market that relies on information on global fuel consumption to identify flow demand for oil. We show that under mild identifying assumptions, data on global fuel consumption help to provide comparatively sharp insights on elasticities and other key structural parameters of the global oil market.

See More


Bank publications

Bank of Canada Review articles

November 16, 2017

Factors Behind the 2014 Oil Price Decline

Oil prices have declined sharply over the past three years. While both supply and demand factors played a role in the large oil price decline of 2014, global supply growth seems to have been the predominant force. The most important drivers were likely the surprising growth of US shale oil production, the output decisions of the Organization of the Petro-leum Exporting Countries and the weaker-than-expected global growth that followed the 2009 global financial crisis.
Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles JEL Code(s): Q, Q4, Q41, Q43

See More


Journal publications