Date: November 19, 2012

Time: 4:30 pm -

Location: Computer Science 104

Professor James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, presents “Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources and Economic Growth” on November 19, 2012 as part of the Andlinger Center’s 2012-2013 Highlight Seminar Series.

BIOGRAPHY
James D. Hamilton has been a professor in the Economics Department at the University of California at San Diego since 1992, where he also served as department chair from 1999-2002. He had previously taught at the University of Virginia and received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983.

Professor Hamilton has published articles on a wide range of topics including econometrics, business cycles, monetary policy, and energy markets. His graduate textbook on time series analysis has over 12,000 scholarly citations and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. Academic honors include election as a Fellow of the Econometric Society and Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, as well as the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, New York, Richmond, and San Francisco. He has also been a consultant for the National Academy of Sciences, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the European Central Bank and has testified before the United States Congress.

ABSTRACT
This talk explores details behind the phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half and the implications if that trend should be reversed.  I document that a key feature of the growth in production has been exploitation of new geographic areas rather than application of better technology to existing sources, and suggest that the end of that era could come soon.  The economic dislocations that historically followed temporary oil supply disruptions will be reviewed, and the possible implications of that experience for what the transition era could look like will be explored.