A Time-Series Analysis of U.S. Petroleum Industry Inventory Behavior

Abstract

This paper examines inventory behavior in the U.S. petroleum industry. Inventories of crude oil and its three major products-gasoline, distillate and residual fuel oil-are studied. Earlier empirical studies of inventory behavior have been unable to provide evidence of the production smoothing role of inventories emphasized in the theoretical literature (see Blinder, 1984). We suggest that these results are due to a tradition of relying on a partial-adjustment model to explain inventory behavior. We feel that the partial-adjustment model ignores potentially significant relationships between lagged values of explanatory variables and inventories implied by dynamic analysis. This leads us to investigate the time-series properties of petroleum inventories using the vector autoregression (VAR) methodology developed by Sims (1980).

Keywords

Oil industry inventory behavior Time series analysis VAR models

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