Structural change and asymmetry analysis of petroleum product prices in Korea

This paper examines structural breaks and asymmetries of prices of four domestic petroleum products, i.e., gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and bunker-C, following the changes in the pricing policies pertaining to petroleum products in Korea from the government-controlled pricing system to the market pricing system. We use the monthly wholesale market price data for the sample period between July 1988 and December 2001. Using the four methods: the Chow test, the CUSUM/CUSUMQ tests, the Bayesian approach and the Dufour test, the structural behaviors of the petroleum product prices are examined. We found that structural change occurred in all petroleum products, with the exception of Kerosene, at the point of pricing policy change from government-controlled to the spot-price related pricing system. We, also conducted asymmetric analysis using the Borenstein, Cameron, and Gilbert (1997)'s model and found evidences of price asymmetry for all four product types, but in different pattern for each product.