Does uncertainty about oil prices slow down the economy
It's not the latest jump in oil prices that takes a toll on the economy but the uncertainty over what will happen in the future. But getting a handle on such uncertainty is a difficult task.
Reviewing the Oil Price - GDP Growth Relationship: A Replication Study
This paper presents a thorough replication of Hamilton (2003) which in turn replicates and extends the findings of four seminal papers regarding the oil price–GDP growth relationship. Firstly, we replicate the empirical results obtained with the oil price measures of Hamilton (1983), Mork (1989), Lee et al. (1995), Hamilton (1996), and Hamilton (2003) by using an identical data set of real and nominal oil prices. Secondly, we extend the data sets to 2019Q4 and apply the same methodology. We find that for more recent data the explanatory power of the proposed oil price measures on GDP growth rates is still present, albeit on a slightly weaker magnitude. Extending the ARX(4), we only find little evidence that oil price decreases impact GDP growth rates on the full data set. Parameter stability tests suggest that the impact of oil price decreases might be limited to certain periods.
Professor Penck's Bluff: Geography, Espionage and Hysteria in World War I
Abstract This article considers the image of geography during World War I through a discussion of newspaper controversies about the pre‐war activities of German and British geographers. Early in the war, Sven Hedin and Albrecht Penck, renowned geographers whose achievements had been widely celebrated by the British geographical establishment, were named in the media as enemy spies whose supposedly disinterested scientific inquiries in Britain and the Empire had masked their real intention to pass sensitive information to the German High Command. British geography stood accused of collusion with enemy ‘super spies’. This article examines how Britain's geographical community, represented by the Royal Geographical Society, sought to defend the discipline's patriotic virtue and head off a full‐scale media witch‐hunt. In so doing, the article comments on the media's role in shaping the image of geography and on geography's place in public debates about the sanctity of the national space.