This paper empirically examines the impact of oil price volatility on key macroeconomic variables in Thailand by using vector auto-regression systems. The empirical results from the Granger causality test show that there is unidirectional causality running from oil price volatility to investment, unemployment rate, interest rate and trade balance for the whole data period. The impulse responses show that, in most of the cases, realized volatility has an impact on the shorter time horizon, with the highest impact on investment and unemployment rate. Like Cunado and Gracia (2005) and Guo and Kliesen (2005), this study finds that the nature of the relationship between oil price volatility and economic indicators is a short-term one.Results from the impulse response functions and variance decomposition confirm that a fair portion of fluctuations in unemployment rate and investment is explained by oil price volatility. All these findings support the popular notion of the impact of uncertainty on delaying and reducing investment, which consequently transmits to unemployment through sectoral restructuring and resource reallocation. It can be inferred from the VAR system for the full period that oil price volatility has significant impact on growth, employment and investment. However, since Perron (1997) test identifies structural breaks in all the variables around 1997–1998 (during the Asian Financial Crisis), the study decomposes the whole time period into two and employs VAR analysis for the period of 1999Q1–2006Q4. The results after the financial crisis show that adverse effect of oil price volatility has been mitigated to some extent. During this period budget deficit has been affected most, which may be due to the change in exchange rate regime that put higher pressure on oil fund. It seems that oil subsidization plays significant role in improving economic performance by lessening the adverse effect of oil price volatility on macroeconomic indicators. The policy implication of this result would be that the government should keep pursuing its policy to stabilize domestic oil price through subsidization and thus help boost investment, employment, and growth.