Thanks to falling oil prices, shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s forthcoming California spinoff are trading off-exchange well below analysts’ earlier expectations.

Shares of California Resources Corp. opened trading off-exchange on Nov. 13 roughly 15 percent below analysts’ projections last month, reflecting the steadily dropping price for crude oil. This prompted an analyst with Barclays Capital Inc. in New York the next day to downgrade parent Occidental to “underweight.”

California Resources’ off-market shares closed Friday at $8.45, according to Bloomberg.

The California Resources subsidiary, which for now is headquartered in Westwood, formally completes its spinoff from Houston-based Occidental on Dec. 1, after which it will trade separately on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CRC.

When analysts began making estimates for California Resources Corp. shares last month, they expected shares would open off-market trading this month at around $10. But in the intervening weeks, the West Texas Intermediate benchmark oil price fell more than 10 percent to about $76 a barrel. (The benchmark has fallen about 30 percent from its June peak.)

Analysts say that’s the major reason why California Resources shares opened off-market trading last week in the $8 range. With about 387 million shares expected to be outstanding on Dec. 1, the company is now valued at just under $3.3 billion.

Adding to the downdraft was Barclays Capital analyst Thomas Driscoll’s downgrade of Occidental to “underweight” from “equal weight.”

“The market is pricing CRC at a significant discount to U.S. peers,” Driscoll said in his downgrade report. California Resources accounts for roughly 20 percent of parent Occidental’s cash flow, meaning the remainder of Occidental has to perform significantly better than market peers to make up for this poor performance, he said.