Characteristics of petroleum product prices: A survey

We review and synthesize the empirical evidence on several factors related to petroleum product prices: (1) the general distributional characteristics of petroleum product prices; (2) the influence of refinery outages, extreme weather, and similar circumstances on product prices; (3) the way that price discovery occurs for petroleum products; (4) the predictive accuracy of petroleum product futures prices for future spot prices; and (5) the impact of speculation on product prices.