Oil Prices, Gasoline Prices and Inflation Expectations

Seminar abstract

It has long been suspected, given the salience of gasoline prices, that fluctuations in gasoline prices shift households’ one-year inflation expectations.

Assessing this view empirically requires the use of dynamic structural models to quantify the cumulative effect of gasoline price shocks on household inflation expectations at each point in time. We find that, on average, gasoline price shocks account for about one third of the variation in these expectations.

The cumulative increase in household inflation expectations from early 2009 to early 2013, in particular, is almost entirely explained by unexpectedly rising gasoline prices.

Since much of this effect occurred only toward the end of this period, however, this result does not support the view that the improved fit of the Phillips curve augmented by household inflation expectations during 2009-13 is explained by rising gasoline prices.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar is free to attend and we ask you to contact the organiser for details on how to join.

We welcome you to join us online on Wednesday 15 December at 4pm.

Bring along your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Speaker bio

Dr Lutz Kilian has been a Senior Economic Policy Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas since the summer of 2019. Prior to this, he was Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan.

Dr Kilian has served as an advisor and consultant for several international organizations, such as the European Central Bank, the Federal research Board, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, etc.

His research interests include time series econometrics, empirical macroeconomics, and energyeconomics.

Much of his recent research is concerned with the sources of fluctuations in the price of oil, with the transmission of oil price shocks to the U.S. economy, with the role of speculation in global oil markets, with measuring oil price expectations in financial markets, and with oil price forecasting.

His work in time series econometrics is focused on bootstrap methods of inference for autoregressions, on impulse response analysis, on the estimation of structural parameters in DSGE models, on thespecification and identification of structural VAR models, among others.

Dr Kilian has published over 100 articles. His work has appeared in leading general interest and field journals in economics and statistics, such as;

• American Economic Review,
• Econometrica,
• Journal of Political Economy,
• Journal of the American Statistical Association,
• Review of Economics and Statistics,
• Journal of Econometrics etc.

He has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, the Journalof Development Economics, and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.