Dynamics of heating oil market prices in Europe

This paper concerns the German and French heating oil market and attempts to establish long- and short-term relationships between German and French monthly heating oil prices in dollars, the Rotterdam spot price for the same product and the DM/US$ and FF/US$ exchange rates during the period from January 1987 to December 1997. To model the market over the period under consideration, incorporating the Gulf War, we have used conventional unit root tests and sequential tests allowing structural changes. Long-term relationships, with shifts in regime detected by cointegration tests taking structural breaks into consideration, are estimated. The short-term dynamics defined by a vector error correction (VEC) mechanism is derived in a classic manner when in presence of a cointegrated VAR system. The econometric results obtained are commented on from an economic point of view. Weak exogeneity tests are performed and the conditional VEC model is deduced, enabling measurement of the instantaneous impact of variations in weakly exogenous exchange rates on variations in heating oil prices in Germany and France. Lastly, a study is made of the asymmetric reaction of domestic prices to positive and negative variations in exchange rates and the Rotterdam spot quotation. 25 refs