The Oil Price Crash in 2014/15: Was There a (Negative) Financial Bubble?

Abstract

This paper suggests that there was a negative bubble in oil prices in 2014/15, which decreased them beyond the level justified by economic fundamentals. This proposition is corroborated by two sets of bubble detection strategies: the first set consists of tests for financial bubbles, while the second set consists of the log-periodic power law (LPPL) model for negative financial bubbles. Despite the methodological differences between these detection methods, they provided the same outcome: the oil price experienced a statistically significant negative financial bubble in the last months of 2014 and at the beginning of 2015. These results also hold after several robustness checks which consider the effect of conditional heteroskedasticity, model set-ups with additional restrictions, longer data samples, tests with lower frequency data and with an alternative proxy variable to measure the fundamental value of oil