Essays on gasoline price spikes, environmental regulation of gasoline content, and incentives for refinery operation

Since 1999, regional retail and wholesale gasoline markets in the United States have experienced significant price volatility, both intertemporally and across geographic markets. In particular, gasoline prices in California, Illinois and Wisconsin have spiked occasionally well above gasoline prices in nearby states. The three chapters of my thesis study the relationship between gasoline price spikes, environmental regulation of gasoline content, unanticipated refinery outages and other recent structural changes in the domestic oil market. In the first chapter, I detail current regulations related to gasoline content. Implemented regionally to address local mobile-source emissions, gasoline content regulations increase costs to refiners, transporters and distributors of gasoline, as well as reduce the fungibility of gasoline across different regions. Chapter one provides a summary of the regulations and a qualitative description the costs the regulations impose on refiners, transporters and distributors of gasoline. In chapter two, I estimate two distinct effects of gasoline content regulations in California, Illinois and Wisconsin: (i) the effect of increased production costs due to supplementary regulation, and (ii) the effect of incompatibility between these blends and gasoline meeting federal reformulated gasoline standards. Using a structural model based on the production optimization problem of refiners, I simulate wholesale prices for jet fuel, diesel and four blends of gasoline in each geographic market. I then specify a counterfactual in which gasoline in the three states met federal requirements.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Muehlegger, Erich J

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Glenn Ellison and Paul Joskow.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32402

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32402