Oil price shocka nonlinear approach

Resumen

Nowadays, the importance of crude oil goes beyond simple economic aspects and affects social life in general. As such, it is imperative that we should know what the relationship between GDP growth and oil price changes is like. This paper presents evidence of a nonlinear relationship between the two things. We also argue that this non-linearity is not merely due to the use of data from the mid-1980s onwards, as most authors, so far, seem to believe. In fact, we find the existence of non-linearity with the use of data earlier than 1984, and even before 1977. Furthermore, we question that the nonlinear transformations of oil prices proposed in the Literature are able to reflect such non-linearity. We therefore use a non-linear function that relates GDP growth to oil prices, and estimate this function by means of kernel methods, avoiding any assumptions about its form. This kernel estimation improves on the linear estimation, and also improves on both Hamilton?s (2001b) estimation and those of the nonlinear transformations.