Browsing by Subject "öljyn hintashokki"

The main motivation for this thesis is to analyze whether there is a statistical relationship between shocks in oil prices and macroeconomic variables in Finland. Previous studies have suggested that oil price shocks may have effects on macroeconomic aggregates including real GDP, industrial production, CPI inflation, and unemployment. Although there is extensive literature on the topic, little empirical work has been done in Finland. The theoretical part of this study is focused on analyzing the suggested economic relationships between changes in oil prices and macroeconomic variables. The specific features of the Finnish economy related to consumption and acquiring of oil are presented, with comparisons made with the US. An extensive overview of the existing literature on the topic will also be included. In the empirical part of the thetis bivariate and multivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) models are used on Finnish data to study the relationship between oli price shocks and a number of macroeconomic variables. Both monthly and quarterly data is used for the period 1985m6-2010m12 (1985q3-2010q4). Different oil price series and transformations are used in order to ensure robustness of the results and to test for possible asymmetric effects. Findings from bivariate VAR models suggest that oil price shocks are Granger-causal for changes in real GDP, industrial production, inflation, and unemployment with at Ieast some of the oil shock specifications used. The results for the multivariate VAR models include the most important findings of my thesis, since these models allow us to control for interrelations between macroeconomic variables that could be attributed to the oil shocks in bivariate models. The main findings from multivariate models are that the overall responses of industrial production and real GDP to an oil shock are negative, while responses of CPI inflation and the unemployment rate are positive. The findings from the asymmetric oil price series suggest that the responses to positive and negative oil shocks are symmetric.