Global Sourcing in Oil Markets

• Departmental Seminar

Date and Location

Monday, April 23, 2018, 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
ARE Library Conference Room, 4101 Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

This paper develops a multi-country general equilibrium model of oil trade to examine the effects of counterfactual policies on oil prices and trade quantities across the world geography. I exploit data on the imports of American refineries, and derive a new procedure allowing for an all-in-one estimation of refineries’ selected suppliers and purchased quantities. I find that the behavior of crude oil markets modestly deviates from an integrated global market, lifting the ban on U.S. crude oil exports creates a notable distributional impact across producers and refineries, and gains from trade in oil are immensely larger than those in benchmark models.