How do oil supply and carbon policy affect firms’ expectations and decisions?

This paper analyzes how unexpected oil supply shocks shape firms’ inflation expectations and real activity using a dataset of Turkish manufacturing firms. At the aggregate level, oil supply shocks significantly increase both actual CPI inflation and firms’ average inflation expectations, with effects persisting for up to 15 months. Our firm-level analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity: smaller and highly leveraged firms respond more strongly to oil shocks, significantly raising their expectations for inflation, own prices, and unit costs compared to larger, financially robust firms. Furthermore, these shocks worsen firms’ business outlook and lead to tangible reductions in capacity utilization. Leveraging administrative firm-to-firm transaction data, we show that oil shocks also reduce firms’ sales, purchases, and the number of trading partners — particularly among financially constrained firms — highlighting real dislocations that propagate through production networks. In contrast, carbon price shocks and global temperature changes have no significant impact, consistent with the absence of a binding carbon pricing mechanism in Türkiye during the study period. Our findings highlight oil supply shocks as a crucial driver of firm-level expectations and real activity, emphasizing the importance of incorporating energy-cost dynamics into inflation-targeting frameworks.