Impact of Global Events on Crude Oil Prices
Impact of Global Events on Crude Oil Prices

Summary/Abstract: Crude Oil prices are one of the primary drivers of the world economy. The oil reserves are distributed only in several countries, and the rest of the world is highly dependent on the price and availability of this essential energy source. The worldwide economic growth has a substantial impact on oil consumption. On the other hand, oil prices affect expectations of economic growth of countries strongly dependent on oil production or consumption. Crude oil prices are mainly determined by the oil production policies set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Additionally, crude oil prices react to a variety of geopolitical and economic events that can lead to unplanned under- or oversupply of oil.The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) is the most comprehensive and most up-to-date open source dataset of global events and contains over a 380 million events records in over 300 categories covering most of the world from 1979 to present. We use GDELT event database to study the mutual dependencies of crude oil prices and global events.We select the top ten crude oil exporters and importers and study the events that originate from or target these countries. We cover close to seventy percent of the overall world crude oil exports and imports. We extract the average Goldstein index, the average tone of the event news, the number of events occurring in the Source country, and the fraction of internal events. We then build a set of event-sentiment-based indicators and analyze the evolution of these indicators in relation with crude oil prices over time. We investigate event volatilities as well as event correlations with crude oil prices.

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