The Unassuming Economist

From a new paper by John Asker, Allan Collard-Wexler, Charlotte De Canniere, Jan De Loecker and Christopher R. Knittel:

“Market power reduces equilibrium quantities and distorts production, typically causing welfare losses. However, as Buchanan (1969) noted, market power may mitigate overproduction from negative externalities. This paper examines this in the global oil market, where OPEC’s market power affects oil production and carbon intensity. We estimate that from 1970 to 2021, OPEC’s market power reduced emissions by over 67 GtCO2, equating to $4,073 billion in climate damages and 17.8% of the carbon budget needed for the 1.5◦ C Paris Agreement target. This environmental benefit outweighs the welfare loss from distorted production allocation.”

From a paper by Cheol-Keun Cho and Myunghyun Kim:

“We consider a proxy FAVAR (Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression) model to analyze the impact of an oil supply news shock on the Korean economy. To identify an oil supply news shock, we use the variation in oil futures prices around OPEC production announcements as a proxy. Moreover, we include a factor that captures the common movement of many Korean macro variables such as various price indices and investment. The estimation results of the proxy FAVAR model show that an oil supply news shock increases the real oil price and the US CPI, and decreases world oil production and US GDP. As for Korean macro variables, GDP and net exports fall and CPI increases in response to the shock.”

From a new paper by Nicholas Apergis and Hany Fahmy:

“This paper explores the link between geopolitical risks and energy prices crash risk. Studying energy price crashes is important given the sharp fall in oil prices in 2008 and 2014. The analysis focuses on three energy markets: natural gas, oil, and coal, while it employs two measures: the negative coefficient of skewness and the down-to-up volatility, to construct proxies for crash risks. The period of examination is January 2000 to December 2023, whereas that for coal is January 2010 to December 2023. The study employs a modified version of the smooth transition autoregressive model. The results show that, within the modelling framework, coal and oil crash risks are driven by the cyclical behavior of geopolitical acts, whereas natural gas crash risks by geopolitical threats. Causality tests confirm the prediction that geopolitical tensions cause crash risks in energy markets. The results also confirm that the “Economic Activity Channel” is only valid for energy markets driven by geopolitical threats. Energy market regulators should be concerned about crash risks, given that the energy supply shows cyclical boom and bust cycles in prices and production. Crash risks could also potentially cause a fall in investments required to enhance energy efficiency.”

From a paper by Jeisson Riveros and Muhammad Shahbaz:

“Nowadays, nobody can deny the relationship between economic growth and sustainability; however, the tendency to un-match a linear relationship between those two has acquired the name of “decoupling” economy, which means that the consumption of energy not necessarily has to rise at the same rate of gross domestic product, in order to reduce carbon emissions in a country or certain area. Then this document aims to study the Colombian decoupling, analyzing the economic structure and energy consumption between 1975 to 2021, applying the TAPIO model and the logarithmic mean Divisa index (LMDI) using the KAYA identity as a conversion factor (TAPIO+KAYA+LMDI) to analyze the trends per economical sector. Finding that, the Colombian economy has a predominant status of weak decoupling with randomly switches to strong decoupling, positioning it as a sustainable economy; although this condition is environmentally favorable, under a comprehensive public policy, energy consumption by economic sector can be increased to improve economic productivity and achieve better production levels on the sectors of agriculture, mines, and commerce whose energy consumption according to the data is substantially low.”

Source: Project Syndicate

“The explosive growth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has opened up a new front in the broader climate crisis by threatening to offset the progress made in recent years toward decarbonization. For the technology to gain wider adoption over the long term, its proponents will have to get serious about reducing its energy usage“, writes Marion Laboure of Harvard University.

The extensive power requirements in the cryptocurrency mining process, especially of those currencies limited in supply like Bitcoin, have generated a global debate on the sustainability of the process. While China banned the mining of cryptocurrency in September 2021 amidst an already debilitating energy crisis, other countries like El Salvador have adopted other methods like establishing a crypto mining city near a volcano to power the process using geothermal energy. Clearly, the world is divided on the matter. This article explores the issue in greater detail, charts out the environment-revenue trade-off before economies, and explores potential solutions.

Read on to know more.