Three Essays on National Oil Company Efficiency,Energy Demand and Transportation

摘要

This dissertation is composed of three separate essays in the field of energyeconomics. In the first paper, both data envelopment analysis and stochastic productionfrontier estimation are employed to provide empirical evidence on the revenue efficiencyof national oil companies (NOCs) and private international oil companies (IOCs). Usinga panel of 80 oil producing firms, the analysis suggests that NOCs are generally lessefficient at generating revenue from a given resource base than IOCs, with someexceptions. Due to differing firm objectives, however, structural and institutionalfeatures may help explain much of the inefficiency.The second paper analyzes the relationship between economic development andthe demand for energy. Energy consumption is modeled using panel data from 1990 to2004 for 50 countries spanning all levels of development. We find the relationshipbetween energy consumption and economic development corresponds to the structure ofaggregate output and the nature of derived demand for electricity and direct -use fuels ineach sector. Notably, the evidence of non-constant income elasticity of demand is muchgreater for electricity demand than for direct-use fuel consumption. In addition, we showthat during periods of rapid economic development, one in which the short-term growthiiirate exceeds the long-run average, an increase in aggregate output is met by less energyefficientcapital. This is a result of capital being fixed in the short-term. As additional,more efficient capital stock is added to the production process, the short-term increase inenergy intensity will diminish.In the third essay, we develop a system of equations to estimate a model of motorvehicle fuel consumption, vehicle miles traveled and implied fuel efficiency for the 67counties of the State of Florida from 2001 to 2008. This procedure allows us todecompose the factors of fuel demand into elasticities of vehicle driving demand and fuelefficiency. Particular attention is paid to the influence of the price of fuel, the sale ofgoods and services, vehicle ownership and population density on each component of ourmodel.