• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.311-342
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• 2015

We evaluate two main rationales of massive policy intervention of Lee Administration in the Korean transportation fuel market: high market share of domestic refineries, perceived by the Administration as the result of high market concentration, and asymmetry in price adjustment, perceived as the result of collusion. Domestic refineries, huge in capacity and located at seaports, maintain international competitiveness in price. Considering market openness offering preferential treatment to importers, they set domestic prices competitively on the basis of MOPS prices. Yet, the price competitiveness of domestic refineries is so high that they are able to sustain high market share. We confirm that the Korean before-tax consumer prices of gasoline and diesel are lower than Japan's and the weighted averages of 27 EU countries by as much as 159KRW and 21KRW per liter in the case of gasoline and 170KRW and 63KRW in the case of diesel. Price asymmetry is caused by diverse economic and managerial reasons and, as FTC (2005) states, price asymmetry does not immediately imply exercise of market power or collusion. We analyzed price asymmetry in Korea, Japan and 14 EU countries, and found asymmetry in Korea and 11 EU countries in the case of gasoline and in Korea and 8 EU countries in the case of diesel.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.813-843
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• 2008

This paper investigates the presence of long-run and short-run price asymmetries in weekly gasoline prices from January 1997 to July 2008. In accordance with distribution channels, wholesale and retail stages are analyzed separately. An approach based on TAR and M-TAR cointegration tests, which entail matching asymmetric ECMs, is employed. For wholesale prices, asymmetries in the links with crude oil prices and exchange rates are found for both ECMs in the long-run and short-run. Exchange rates appear to play more significant role than crude oil prices in explaining the short-run price asymmetry. The rise in crude oil prices or exchange rates has statistically significant major impact on the increase of wholesale prices on the second week, not immediately as expected in the concept of 'rockets and feathers'. And asymmetrically, the fall does not have any statistically significant effect on the same period. The finding seems to be somewhat unusual. However, for retail prices, asymmetry m connection with wholesale prices is only revealed in the long-run. A symmetric price adjustment can be assumed in the short-run. Contrary to the long-run asymmetry found in the wholesale stage, in the retail stage, the speed of adjustment for negative deviations toward long-run equilibrium is faster than for positive ones, which is a phenomenon not favorable to consumers.