Open AccessCan Crude Oil Futures Predict Sport Retail Unleaded Gasoline Prices?
Author(s) -
Vance Ginn,
R. Gilbert
Publication year - 1970
Publication title -
journal of business strategies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2162-6901
pISSN - 0887-2058
DOI - 10.54155/jbs.26.2.191-210
Subject(s) - futures contract , gasoline , crude oil , crack spread , econometrics , economics , estimator , casual , financial economics , monetary economics , oil price , statistics , mathematics , petroleum engineering , chemistry , engineering , materials science , organic chemistry , composite material
The motivation for this paper began with casual empiricism regarding thebrief distributed lag of retail gasoline prices behind crude oil futures. We developeda model consistent with our hypothesis and tested it with econometrics using statisticaldata that include the sharp decrease in crude oil price futures in late summer2008. We found that our model is a consistent and efficient estimator of the actualgasoline prices over most of our sample period. However, random shocks to gasolineprices, like Hurricane Ike in 2008, cause the model to have problems accuratelypredicting gas prices. We conclude that our estimated model and simulations providereasonable support for our hypothesis that crude oil price futures can predict spotretail unleaded gasoline prices.