EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Are unleaded gasoline and diesel price adjustments symmetric? A comparison of the four largest EU retail fuel markets

Stelios Karagiannis, Yannis Panagopoulos and Prodromos Vlamis

Economic Modelling, 2015, vol. 48, issue C, 281-291

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of price adjustments in the gasoline markets of Germany, France, Italy and Spain. We examine whether crude oil prices are transmitted to the retail gasoline prices in the short and long run and we test the symmetry of price adjustments hypothesis. An Error Correction Model, which accounts for possible asymmetric adjustment behavior, is applied for the estimation of the international crude oil price pass-through and testing of the symmetric/asymmetric nature of the retail fuel price adjustments in these economies. Our results show that rigidities in the transmission process exist but the retail fuel speed of upward/downward price adjustment to equilibrium is considered as symmetric in all four economies analyzed. Thus, our findings on the whole do not provide firm evidence to support the “rockets and feathers” hypothesis that crude oil price increases are passed along to the retail customer more fully than the crude oil price decreases.

Keywords: Crude oil price pass-through; “decomposed” Error Correction Model; Symmetry of price adjustments hypothesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999314004234
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:48:y:2015:i:c:p:281-291

DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2014.11.003

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly

More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:48:y:2015:i:c:p:281-291