OPEC in the news

This paper introduces a newspaper article count index related to OPEC that rises in response to important OPEC meetings and events connected with OPEC production levels. I use this index to measure how interest in OPEC varies over time and investigate how oil price volatility behaves when the index unexpectedly changes. I find that unexpected increases in the newspaper index are strongly associated with higher levels of oil price volatility, both realized and implied. In some cases, these unexpected movements appear to be driven by an unpredictable OPEC event, such as the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. In other cases, such as the oil price collapses in late 2008 and late 2014, unforeseen developments in the oil market or broader economy seem to generate the unexpected movements in price volatility and interest in OPEC. The newspaper index is highly correlated with Google search volume data on OPEC, an alternative measure of the amount of attention paid to OPEC events.