What do international energy prices have in common after taking into account the key drivers?

Abstract

Differences across international energy prices are driven by many factors, but what do energy prices have in common? We analyze global and group-specific co-movements in the energy market by means of a Dynamic Factor Model with Cluster Structure. A new extension of the model is included which allows to evaluate the effect of macroeconomic variables which are country-specific over energy prices. A Monte Carlo experiment is carried out in order to test the estimation performance of the proposed extension. In a Big Data scenario of 30 countries and 12 industrial sectors we find that the co-movements between energy prices are related to groups of countries and may be classified within four groups. The connections within groups may be explained by high prices of a specific fuel type.