A0871
Title: Daily dynamics of retail gasoline price dispersion in Japan
Authors: Etsuro Shioji - Chuo University (Japan) [presenting]
Shiro Yuasa - Hitotsubashi University (Japan)
Abstract: The evolution of price distribution across gasoline stations in Japan is investigated. The data is obtained from a price comparison site and covers all the days between August 2018 and early January 2020. We control for various features of individual stations, such as regions, corporate group affiliations, and types of extra services offered at those stations. We also adjust for the infamously heavy Japanese taxes on gasoline. After all these treatments, the skewness and the kurtosis of the price distribution turn out to be relatively stable over time. On the other hand, we find that the price dispersion across the shops tends to widen when the world price of crude oil goes down, a tendency that is similar to those reported for other countries by previous studies. We study causes behind this pattern.
