Replication Data for Working Paper: Oil Price Shocks and Monetary Policy Responses: Evidence from China

China’s crude oil import has increased sharply since 2002. Its expenditure on oil import now accounts for around 10% of its total commodity import. Thus, there is potential imported inflation or deflation due to oil price fluctuations and China’s central bank may respond to it. We quantitatively analyze the impact of oil prices on China’s benchmark interest rate and monetary supply by a 6-variable structural vector auto-regression model. We draw that: 1) In response to an increase of oil price, China’s central bank generally upgrades interest rate. If oil price rises by 10 US dollars, the 6-month lending base rate will increase by around 0.13 percentage point in 3 months. 2) The effects of price shocks deepen after the oil pricing reform, and specifically, it can explain 19.8% of the variations in monetary policies in one year after October 2008, compared with the 0.83% before October 2001.