Does renewable energies' usage act as a shield against oil price changes?

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the existing literature on equity markets and energy prices by studying the impact of oil price changes on several American and European companies, taking into consideration their level of renewable energies’ usage within the total energy consumption. The results show that in fact there is an overall negative impact of oil price changes. However, when we split the oil price changes in positive and negative ones, it seems that their impact is symmetric, being positive (negative) when the change is negative (positive). Using the level of renewable energies in the estimation models, the conclusion that arrives is that there could be an optimal maximum level of green energies’ usage, for which the companies can somewhat benefit from a protection against oil price changes, thus hedging against its risk.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Joni Kokkonen (Supervisor)