| By: |
Juan Luís Jiménez (Departamento de Análisis Económico Aplicado. Grupo de Economía de las Infraestructuras y el Transporte. Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria);
Jordi Perdiguero (PPRE-IREA, Universitat de Barcelona) |
| Abstract: |
Various methodologies in economic literature have been used to analyse the
international hydrocarbon retail sector. Nevertheless at a Spanish level these
studies are much more recent and most conclude that generally there is no
effective competition present in this market, regardless of the approach used.
In this paper, in order to analyse the price levels in the Spanish petrol
market, our starting hypothesis is that in uncompetitive markets the prices
are higher and the standard deviation is lower. We use weekly retail petrol
price data from the ten biggest Spanish cities, and apply Markov chains to
fill the missing values for petrol 95 and diesel, and we also employ a
variance filter. We conclude that this market demonstrates reduced price
dispersion, regardless of brand or city. |
| Keywords: |
Competition, Petrol, Variance filter analysis, Gibbs sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo. |
| JEL: |
L13 L59 L71 |
| Date: |
2009–05 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:xrp:wpaper:xreap2009-5&r=ind |