Asymmetric gasoline price responses in France

This article examines the response of gasoline prices in France to shocks to
crude oil prices in the international market. Using the Autoregressive
Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach of cointegration, we
investigate potential price asymmetries in the French diesel and premium
gasoline markets using weekly data over the period from May 1990 to April
2011. We find that gasoline prices gradually adjust towards a long-term
equilibrium after a shock to the crude oil price, but this adjustment is lower
when the crude oil price decreases than when it increases. We also find that
the estimates differ slightly depending on the chosen gasoline price.