Oil Spot Prices’ Next Day Volatility: Comparison of European and American Short-Run Forecasts

Abstract

The aim of the current paper is to estimate spot prices’ next-day volatility of the two largest kinds of crude oil, European Brent oil and American WTI oil, and examine differences due to selected global incidents. Daily data for oil spot prices are from May 1987 till January 2015. The contribution of the study is in a comparison of oil spot prices’ development and impacts of the Euro sovereign debt crises, recent global financial crises, and also the historical affairs as the military conflict in the Persian Gulf in 1990, or particular incidents after the start of the new millennium. The estimation method for short-run forecasting is the volatility model GARCH (1,1). While it has been proven that there was higher volatility during the global financial crisis within American WTI oil prices, higher errors were examined within European Brent oil prices. There was no higher volatility due to the euro crisis in the last 4 years. Nonetheless, both investigated oil prices were affected by highest volatility during military conflict in 1990 in our estimated period. It was clearly concluded that military conflicts can affect oil prices in a much higher way than recent financial crises.