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While we can say that there is a global market for crude oil, we cannot say the same for natural gas. There is a strand of literature that argues that, in the last decades, gas markets have become less regional and more global. We use wavelets to test this hypothesis and conclude otherwise: although the European and Japanese gas markets are significantly synchronized, they are much less than the oil markets, which we take as the benchmark. We also show that the North American gas market fluctuations are independent of the other gas markets. Finally, we show that the existing synchronization between gas markets almost vanishes once one filters out the effect of oil price variations, suggesting that it is the global oil market that connects the regional gas markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ISCEF special issue of The Energy Journal presents new results in the area of energy economics to provide new insights on commodity markets, which will be helpful for investors, policymakers and analysts. In particular, this issue focuses on studies that use recent modeling techniques and empirical design. It introduces seven studies, presented at the fifth International Symposium in Computational Economics and Finance organized in Paris on April 12-14th, 2018 (www.iscef. com). These studies focus on the investigation of the dynamics of commodity markets, discuss the consequences of uncertainty on energy prices and their effects on the real economy and financial markets, and use high frequency data and recent econometric methods to empirically investigate the interactions between commodity markets and financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, individual countries have introduced national climate policies. Unilateral action involves the risk of relocating emissions to regions without climate regulations, i.e., emission leakage. A major channel for leakage are price changes in the international oil market. Previous studies on leakage have assumed competitive behavior in this market. Here, we consider alternative assumptions about OPEC's behavior in order to assess how these affect leakage and costs of unilateral climate policies. Our results based on simulations with a large-scale computable general equilibrium model of the global economy suggest that assumptions on OPEC's behavior are crucial to the impact assessment of unilateral climate policy measures. We find that leakage through the oil market may become negative when OPEC is perceived as a dominant producer, thereby reducing overall leakage drastically compared to a setting where the oil market is perceived competitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]