Three Essays about Energy Prices and Energy Markets

摘要

In this dissertation, three related issues concerning empirical time series and panel models for three essays in energy economics will be investigated. The overall theme of these essays is to explore the relationships between the use of and prices for fossil fuels (coal, crude oil, and natural gas) along with larger societal issues of stock market changes, resource extraction rates, and CO2 emissions. The three main questions will be addressed: (1) how do crude oil prices affect stock markets?, (2) how have the dynamic linkages between the coal market and natural gas prices changes with the shale gas revolution?, and (3) how have urbanization and other factors impacted CO2 emissions? For each question, it is considered proper econometric models to provide empirical answers which will contribute either to the academic literature or energy economics and policy.;In the first essay, we investigate linkages between oil price changes and stock market capitalization in Middle Eastern (ME) economies from 2000--2015. This essay examines how oil price changes influence stock market capitalization by using a variety of econometric models including structural breaks, VECM, VAR, and IRF. These results suggest the existence of positive and significant impacts of oil price on MC for all oil-exporting economies.;The second essay introduces the idea of a dynamic relationship between coal plus-natural gas prices and their impacts on coal consumption and extraction. In this essay, we adopt an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to investigate the short-run and long -run characteristics of coal demand in the U.S. from 2000--2016. Methods and data in this research contribute to the literature on how the natural gas revolution affects the coal industry in the U.S. The findings show that coal and natural gas are substitutes as energy sources in the U.S energy market. Moreover, income elasticity reveals that coal is an inferior source of energy since economic growth has a negative impact on coal demand in the long run. Solar energy and weather both have significant negative impacts on coal consumption over the entire time period. Results provide theoretical and empirical methods of the coal market, and allow for a better understanding of its factors. Also, these results support the policies to substitute natural gas for coal due to coal-natural gas prices, efficiency, and environment friendly.;The final essay combines the issues of urbanization, energy consumption, coal use, energy prices, and CO2 emissions regarding U.S. fossil fuel consumption. Fossil fuels make up more than 80% of the human's energy use (U.S. EIA, 2016) and more than 75% of fossil fuels are used in urban areas. Therefore, dynamic long- run linkages between fossil fuel energy use and urbanization are of importance to energy policy makers across the globe. This essay focuses on spillover impacts of energy consumption on CO 2 emissions by using spatial autoregressive regression (SAR), spatial error model (SEM), and spatial dynamic model (SDM). Negative direct and positive indirect effects of urbanization on state level CO2 emissions are found along with the negative effects of income along with renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on state level emissions. The income effects provide additional support for the Environmental Kuznets Curve on CO2 emissions such that income growth reduces per capita CO2 emissions at an own state level. For RPS, however, the indirect effects of CO2 emission reductions are as large as the own state direct effects, indicating that cross border impacts are important. Both of these results are important due to the prominence of state and local government actions in climate change mitigation now that the federal government has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords.