Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T03:37:53.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

OIL, UNCERTAINTY, AND GASOLINE PRICES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2016

Dongfeng Chang
Affiliation:
Shandong University
Apostolos Serletis*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
*
Address correspondence to: Apostolos Serletis, Department of Economics, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada. E-mail: Serletis@ucalgary.ca.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the relationship between crude oil and gasoline prices and also examine the effect of oil price uncertainty on gasoline prices. The empirical model is based on a structural vector autoregression that is modified to accommodate multivariate GARCH-in-Mean errors. We use monthly data for the United States over the period from January 1976 to September 2014. We find that there is an asymmetric relationship between crude oil and gasoline prices, and that oil price uncertainty has a positive effect on gasoline price changes. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications and alternative measures of the price of oil.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This paper is based on Chapter 3 of Dongfeng Chang's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Calgary. The research has been supported in part by the Fundamental Research Funds of Shandong University. We would like to thank the following members of Dongfeng's dissertation committee: Herbert Emery, Daniel Gordon, Ron Kneebone, David Walls, and Philip Chang.

References

REFERENCES

Akarca, A.T. and Andrianacos, D. (1998) The relationship between crude oil and gasoline prices. International Advances in Economic Research 4, 282288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bachmeier, L.J. and Griffin, J.M. (2003) New evidence on asymmetric gasoline price responses. Review of Economics and Statistics 85, 772776.Google Scholar
Bacon, R.W. (1991) Rockets and feathers: The asymmetric speed of adjustment of UK retail gasoline prices to cost changes. Energy Economics, 211–218.Google Scholar
Balke, N.S., Brown, S.P.A., and Yücel, M.K. (1998) Crude oil and gasoline prices: An asymmetric relationship? Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Economic Review (First Quarter), 2–11.Google Scholar
Borenstein, S., Cameron, A.C., and Gilbert, R. (1997) Do gasoline prices respond asymmetrically to crude oil price changes? Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, 305339.Google Scholar
Borenstein, S. and Shepard, A. (2002) Sticky prices, inventories, and market power in wholesale gasoline markets. RAND Journal of Economics 33, 116139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, S.P.A. and Yücel, M.K. (2000) Gasoline and crude oil prices: Why the asymmetry? Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Economic and Financial Review (Third Quarter), 23–29.Google Scholar
Davis, M.C. and Hamilton, J.D. (2004) Why are prices sticky? The dynamics of wholesale gasoline prices. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 36, 1737.Google Scholar
Dickey, D.A. and Fuller, W.A. (1981) Likelihood ratio statistics for autoregressive time series with a unit root. Econometrica 49, 10571072.Google Scholar
Douglas, C. and Herrera, A.M. (2010) Why are gasoline prices sticky? A test of alternative models of price adjustment. Journal of Applied Econometrics 25, 903928.Google Scholar
Duffy-Deno, K.T. (1996) Retail price asymmetries in local gasoline markets. Energy Economics 18, 8192.Google Scholar
Elder, J. (2003) An impulse response function for a vector autoregression with multivariate GARCH-in-Mean. Economics Letters 79, 2126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elder, J. (2004) Another perspective on the effects of inflation volatility. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 36, 911928.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elder, J. and Serletis, A. (2010) Oil price uncertainty. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 42, 11371159.Google Scholar
Engle, R.F. (1982) Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity with estimates of the variance of United Kingdom inflation. Econometrica 50, 9871008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engle, R. F. and Kroner, K.F. (1995) Multivariate simultaneous generalized ARCH. Econometric Theory 11, 122150.Google Scholar
Hamilton, J.D. (1994) Time Series Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hamilton, J.D. (2003) What is an oil shock? Journal of Econometrics 113, 363398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, R.N. (2002) Search costs, lags and prices at the pump. Review of Industrial Organization 20, 3350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karrenbrock, J.D. (1991) The behavior of retail gasoline prices: Symmetric or not? Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review 73, 1929.Google Scholar
Kaufmann, R.K. and Laskowski, C. (2005) Causes for an asymmetric relation between the price of crude oil and refined petroleum products. Energy Policy 33, 15871596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kilian, L. and Vigfusson, R.J. (2011) Are the responses of the U.S. economy asymmetric in energy price increases and decreases? Quantitative Economics 2, 419453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kwiatkowski, D., Phillips, P.C.B., Schmidt, P., and Shin, Y. (1992) Testing the null hypothesis of stationarity against the alternative of a unit root. Journal of Econometrics 54, 159178.Google Scholar
Pagan, A. (1984) Econometric issues in the analysis of regressions with generated regressors. International Economic Review 25, 221247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peltzman, S. (2000) Prices rise faster than they fall. Journal of Political Economy 108, 466502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radchenko, S. (2005) Oil price volatility and the asymmetric response of gasoline prices to oil price increases and decreases. Energy Economics 27, 708730.Google Scholar
Radchenko, S. and Shapiro, D. (2011) Anticipated and unanticipated effects of crude oil prices and gasoline inventory changes on gasoline prices. Energy Economics 33, 758769.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rahman, S. and Serletis, A. (2011) The asymmetric effects of oil price shocks. Macroeconomic Dynamics 15 (Supplement 3), 437471.Google Scholar
Schwarz, G. (1978) Estimating the dimension of a model. Annals of Statistics 6, 461464.Google Scholar