Asymmetric pass through of oil prices to gasoline prices: Evidence from a new country sample

This paper investigates the asymmetric pass-through of oil prices to gasoline prices under the non-linear auto regressive distributed lags (NARDL) model. The analysis adds to the unsettled discussion of whether retail gasoline prices respond asymmetrically to oil prices and it is carried out for the US, the UK, Spain, Italy and Greece, spanning the period January 2009 to July 2016. These countries have been selected on the basis that fuel markets are differentiated by the structure of retail markets (oligopolistic behavior, production lags and market competition), which depends on extraction, refinery and distribution. The analysis considers markets that differ in terms of their structure. Both short- and long-run non-linearity are tested by deriving both the positive and negative partial sum decompositions of the dependent variable. In addition, it was feasible to quantify the responses to positive and negative oil price shocks from the asymmetric dynamic multipliers. The findings indicate that oil and gasoline prices provide mixed evidence of an asymmetric behavior. Short-run asymmetry is found in the Italian market, while in the Spanish market there is evidence of both short- and long-run asymmetry. The remaining cases (Greece, U.K., U.S.) illustrate a symmetric pass-through scheme of oil to retail gasoline prices.