This paper surveys the history of the oil industry with a particular focus on the events associated with significant changes in the price of oil. Although oil was used much differently and was substantially less important economically in the nineteenth century than it is today, there are...

This paper explores similarities and differences between the run-up of oil prices in 2007-08 and earlier oil price shocks, looking at what caused the price increase and what effects it had on the economy. Whereas historical oil price shocks were primarily caused by physical disruptions of...

This paper discusses the problems associated with using information about the signs of certain magnitudes as a basis for drawing structural conclusions in vector autoregressions. We also review available tools to solve these problems. For illustration we use Dahlhaus and Vasishtha's (2019) study...

Traditional approaches to structural vector autoregressions can be viewed as special cases of Bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs. These methods can be generalized with a less restrictive formulation that incorporates uncertainty about the identifying assumptions...

Yes, as inferred from panel evidence for inflation-targeting countries and a control group of high-achieving industrial countries that do not target inflation. Our evidence suggests that inflation targeting helps countries achieve lower inflation in the long run, have smaller inflation response...

In this paper we examine how target ranges work in the context of a Barro-Gordon (1983) type model, in which the time-inconsistency problem stems from political pressures from the government. We show that target ranges turn out to be an excellent way to cope with the time-inconsistency problem,...