Güntner, J., & Öhlinger, P. (2022). Oil price shocks and the hedging benefit of airline investments. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 143, 104507.
Link to published version
In the light of finite oil reserves, Persian Gulf oil-exporting economies have recently undertaken major investments in their domestic travel and tourism industries. Building on the Bayesian SVAR model of the global oil market in Baumeister and Hamilton (2019), we investigate the conditional comovement of airline stock returns with real oil prices in response to structural oil supply and demand shocks. We find that investing in the Datastream World Airline Index offers a hedging benefit conditional on oil supply, consumption demand, and inventory demand shocks, whereas there is no evidence of systematic positive or negative comovement following shocks to world economic activity and airline stock returns.
Motivated by the European Union’s debate on sanctioning crude oil imports from Russia, we estimate the elasticity of substitution between different crude oil types. Using European data on country-level crude oil imports by field of origin, we argue that crude oil is not a homogenous good and that the relevant substitutability for analyzing the impact of trade sanctions must account for the quality of different oil types in terms of their API gravity and sulfur content. Our results suggest that, by neglecting these differences in quality, standard estimates significantly underestimate the production disruptions in crude oil refining resulting from sanctions.
