Causality and volatility spillovers among petroleum prices of WTI, gasoline and heating oil in different locations

Abstract

This paper examines the time series properties of daily spot and futures prices for three petroleum types traded at five commodity centers within and outside the United States. Examining five combinations of the spot and futures prices by petroleum type and trading center, the cointegration tests of each of these five groups suggest that spot and futures contracts offer little room for long-run commodity portfolio diversification. In the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude-oil group, the VEC model indicates that the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) 1-month futures price has the upper hand in terms of directional causality and volatility spillovers. In the NYMEX gasoline system, there are bi-directional causality relationships among all the gasoline spot and futures prices, but the spot price produces the greatest spillover. In the NYMEX heating oil system, information transmission and predictability among the spot, 1- and 3-month futures are found to be particularly strong and significant. In the international gasoline spot market, contrary to the world crude-oil market, there is no apparent world gasoline spot leader for the gasoline spot prices. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.