• Eurozone
• macroeconomics
• near-VAR
• Oil-shocks
• small-economies

A lot has been writen about oil price shocks and their effets. However, much less has been written about the main OECD members and indeed very few papers have engaged in an evaluation for the European countries. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, in the last years some form of cross-comparison of oil shocks’ effects on output and prices among European countries has almost not been investigated.
With this work we will try to fill this small gap in current literature providing an analysis on the effects of oil-shocks on the price level and on GDP for the small economies that founded the Eurozone. These countries include Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain and our dataset goes from the birth of the Euro in 1999 to 2015. To do this we will make use of a structural near-VAR model in the spirit of Cavallo and Ribba (2015), where a first group of equations only includes the lags of the oil price and Euro-area variables while a second group of full-VAR equations also contains national variables. In addition, we will employ an exogenous variable to control for global demand shocks; namely the economic activity index developed by Kilian (2009). The structural disturbances will be identified by imposing a causal structure with contemporaneous restrictions in a Cholesky fashion.