The Impact of Major Events on International Oil Prices

As one of the most important energy sources, oil prices in the past 20 years have shown a roller coaster volatility, which seriously threatens the energy strategy security of oil importing countries. By analyzing the law of oil price operation, this paper finds that the peaks and valleys of oil price fluctuations are associated with some major events. In this context, this paper studies and analyzes the characteristics of oil price fluctuations from the perspective of major events. In this paper, BP structural breakpoint test is conducted on the spot price of WTI crude oil during the sample period, and it is found that there are four structural breakpoints in the oil price series during the sample period, and then the sample is divided into five stages. Through the construction of the ARIMA-EGARCH model, the empirical analysis shows that for different stages, only the "911" event in the second stage has no significant impact on oil price volatility, while major events in the other four stages all have significant impact on oil price volatility, among which the COVID-19 epidemic has the greatest impact on oil price volatility. In the long run, in addition to the "911" incident in the United States, major events in the other four stages have a significant impact on oil price volatility. According to the results of model estimation, the information shock curve is made, and it is found that the fluctuation of WTI crude oil spot price is asymmetric.