Oil consumption, economic growth, and oil futures: The impact of long-run oil supply uncertainty on asset prices

High levels of uncertainty about long-run oil supplies from 2005 to 2012 coincided with significant changes in oil futures markets. Motivated by this fact, this paper provides new evidence on the relations between oil consumption, oil prices, and economic growth, and builds on this evidence to develop a quantitative real business cycle model to study oil price risk. Calibrated model results can match relations between oil prices and economic quantities, and can rationalize behavior in equity and futures markets over this period as a consequence of changing risk premia driven by an increase in long-run oil supply uncertainty.