Over the past decade the primary U.S. crude benchmark, WTI, diverged considerably from its foreign counterpart, Brent, sometimes selling at a steep discount. Some studies pointed to the ban on exporting U.S. crude oil production as the main culprit for this divergence. We find that scarce domestic pipeline capacity explains half to three quarters of the deviation of mid-continent crude oil prices from their long-run relationship with Brent crude. We are unable to find evidence that mismatch between domestic refining configurations and domestic crude characteristics contributed significantly to this deviation. This implies that the short-run deleterious effects of the export ban may have been exaggerated.

Technological progress in the exploration and production of oil and gas during the 2000s has led to a boom in upstream investment and has increased the domestic supply of fossil fuels. It is unknown, however, how many jobs this boom has created. We use time-series methods at the national level and dynamic panel methods at the state level to understand how the increase in exploration and production activity has impacted employment. We find robust statistical support for the hypothesis that changes in drilling for oil and gas as captured by rig counts do, in fact, have an economically meaningful and positive impact on employment. The strongest impact is contemporaneous, though months later in the year also experience statistically and economically meaningful growth. Once dynamic effects are accounted for, we estimate that an additional rig count results in the creation of 37 jobs immediately and 224 jobs in the long run, though our robustness checks suggest that these multipliers could be bigger.

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Asian long-term contracts for liquefied natural gas (LNG) are generally thought to index LNG prices to oil prices. This should mean that LNG and oil prices are cointegrated. However, statistical evidence for cointegration using Japanese data is not strong. To resolve this puzzle, I examine 16 Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, and Spanish LNG import price series and allow for multiple, unknown structural breaks in the relationship to oil prices. This resolves the puzzle, and I provide estimates for the timing of breaks and the underlying average pricing terms. I relate these to count, volume, and duration data on long-term contracts and discuss how to interpret econometric estimates in light of contract data. This paper complements existing work on global gas market integration, which largely ignores how discrete changes in oil-indexed long-term contracts will affect empirical relationships.