The author argues that the economic benefits of low gasoline prices for the U.S. economy have fallen substantially since the reemergence of America as a major oil producer. The old rule-ofthumb that a 10% fall in the oil price raises inflation-adjusted U.S. GDP by 0.2% is too large - the impact...

Obtaining reliable data on capital is a recurring challenge when estimating economy-wide productivity growth, especially for developing countries. In this paper I construct energy-based productivity series which use energy consumption instead of capital when making such estimates. I first show...

We argue for the resurrection of an old idea: electricity use as an indicator of U.S. economic activity. Our analysis relies on associations–the 40-year correlation between growth rates in real GDP and electricity use can be as high as 89% –and intuition. Electricity use and economic...

We describe portions of the U.S input-output tables through the tools of networks analysis—focusing on either energy intensive industries or those that are part of the separate and distinct energy sector. We first represent both energy intensive and energy sector industries visually through...

Crises in the banking and sovereign debt sectors give rise to heightened financial fragility. Of particular concern is the development of self-fulfilling feedback loops where crisis conditions in one sector are transmitted to the other sector and back again. We use time-varying tests of Granger...