IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v27y2011i1p186-206.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Uncertainty, expectations, and fundamentals: whatever happened to long-term oil prices?

Author

Listed:
  • Bassam Fattouh
  • Pasquale Scaramozzino

Abstract

One of the major features of the oil market during the 1990s was the relative stability of the long-term oil price. While the spot price exhibited sharp price volatility, that volatility was only partially transmitted to the back end of the futures curve which was anchored around the $20--22 per barrel range. However, as oil prices rose sharply during the boom years, the consensus on the oil price that would balance the long-term fundamentals of the oil market broke down and the whole futures curve became subject to a series of shifts. Our empirical evidence suggests that in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was limited evidence of adjustment between short-term and long-term oil prices. These dynamics, however, changed in early 2005 with the long-term price making most of the adjustment towards the prompt price. We suggest an interpretation of the long-term behaviour of oil prices based on the insights of two models. The first is based on a signal extraction mechanism and shows that when the private beliefs by investors about the long-run determinants of oil prices become less precise relative to the information contained in the current spot price, then the expected future oil price becomes closer to the current spot price. The second model is based on Bayesian updating and shows that if the variability of the spot price increases and/or if the spot price remains higher over a sustained period of time than anticipated by investors, then the probability distribution of the parameter capturing the speed of mean reversion will shift and the expected future price will move closer to the current spot price. Our analysis predicts that in the face of increased uncertainty the long-term and short-term prices are bound to exhibit similar movements. These changes have important consequences on the oil price formation process. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Bassam Fattouh & Pasquale Scaramozzino, 2011. "Uncertainty, expectations, and fundamentals: whatever happened to long-term oil prices?," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 27(1), pages 186-206, Spring.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:27:y:2011:i:1:p:186-206
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/grr006
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jia Liao & Yu Shi & Xiangyun Xu, 2018. "Why Is the Correlation between Crude Oil Prices and the US Dollar Exchange Rate Time-Varying?—Explanations Based on the Role of Key Mediators," IJFS, MDPI, vol. 6(3), pages 1-13, June.
    2. Aboura, Sofiane & Chevallier, Julien, 2016. "Spikes and crashes in the oil market," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 615-623.
    3. Morana, Claudio, 2013. "Oil price dynamics, macro-finance interactions and the role of financial speculation," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 206-226.
    4. Bassam Fattouh, 2012. "Speculation and Oil Price Formation," Review of Environment, Energy and Economics - Re3, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, February.
    5. Krzysztof Drachal, 2018. "Determining Time-Varying Drivers of Spot Oil Price in a Dynamic Model Averaging Framework," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(5), pages 1-24, May.
    6. Drachal, Krzysztof, 2018. "Comparison between Bayesian and information-theoretic model averaging: Fossil fuels prices example," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 208-251.
    7. Bassam Fattouh, Lutz Kilian, and Lavan Mahadeva, 2013. "The Role of Speculation in Oil Markets: What Have We Learned So Far?," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3).
    8. Drachal, Krzysztof, 2016. "Forecasting spot oil price in a dynamic model averaging framework — Have the determinants changed over time?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 35-46.
    9. Filippo Natoli, 2018. "Analyzing the structural transformation of commodity markets: financialization revisited," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 419, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    10. Lang, Korbinian & Auer, Benjamin R., 2020. "The economic and financial properties of crude oil: A review," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    11. Liao, Jia & Qian, Qi & Xu, Xiangyun, 2018. "Whether the fluctuation of China’s financial markets have impact on global commodity prices?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 503(C), pages 1030-1040.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:27:y:2011:i:1:p:186-206. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.