The impact of disaggregated oil shocks on state-level consumption of the United States

Abstract

We analyse the impact of oil supply, global economic activity, oil-specific consumption demand and oil inventory demand shocks on state-level consumption of the United States (U.S.) over the period of 1975:Q1 to 2012:Q2. We find that positive economic activity shocks and oil production shocks (associated with increase and decrease in oil prices, respectively) increase consumption growth. At the same time, oil-specific consumption and inventory demand shocks raise oil prices and reduce the growth rate of state-level consumption. Across the shocks, the strongest effect originates from the global demand shock. In addition, our above observations are virtually invariant to the degree of oil dependency (oil consumed minus oil produced as a ratio of oil consumed) of the states. Our results have important policy implications.