The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil Prices

The large oil price fluctuations occurred from 2003 to 2008 has raised many questions about their causes. Many empirical studies have attempted to understand how oil price fluctuations are driven by changes in both market fundamentals and speculative pressures. In this regard, some problems arise such as: the use of unreliable data like the global level of inventories or the specification of a vast number of arbitrary restrictions for the models. In this study I try to isolate, coherently with the view of Knittel and Pindyck(2016) and inspired by Kilian's works, the speculative effect on the short-term spot price fluctuations determined by structural forward-looking behavioural shocks produced in the futures market. Exploiting a dataset used in Kilian and Murphy (2012), CFTC data (period 1999M1-2008M6) and taking advantage of the standard theory of storage we will be able to verify, with a Blanchard-Quah structural approach, that the impact of these shocks is remarkable but not the prevalent one in magnitude. Instead, it would seem that speculative inventory holdings may have played a much more important role.