Zusammenfassung:
We propose a structural vector-autoregressive model for the German natural gas market to investigate the impact of the 2022 Russian supply stop on the German economy. We combine conventional and narrative sign restrictions to leverage information about supply cuts for identification and find that gas supply and demand shocks have large and persistent price effects, while output effects are rather moderate. The 2022 natural gas price spike was driven by adverse flow supply shocks and positive storage demand shocks, as Germany filled its inventories before the winter. Counterfactual simulations of an embargo on natural gas imports from Russia indicate similar positive price and negative output effects compared to what we observe in the data.