Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2016
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.
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.