Energy price uncertainty, energy intensity and firm-level investment

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In this dissertation I estimate the effect of oil price and energy price uncertainty and energy price shocks on firm-level investment. An error correction (ECM) model of capital stock adjustment and the dynamic investment model with financial constraints based on the Euler equation are used for estimation. Estimation is by generalized method of moments with instrumental variables (GMM-IV). This dissertation uses two firm-level data sets. The first is for U.S. firms and the second is for European firms. The effect of oil price uncertainty will be examined with over 38,800 observations on over 2,665 publicly traded U.S. firms between 1971 and 2006. The effect of energy price shocks on investment will be examined with data on non-financial firms in 14 European countries between 1992 and 2005. Oil price uncertainty is measured in several ways based on the standard deviation of daily spot oil price and also by the conditional variance obtained from a GARCH model.