Competition in the German Market for Gasoline Retailing

This cumulative dissertation consists of three articles and contributes to various areas of empirical research on competition in gasoline retail markets. It is mainly based on the extensive German fuel price dataset resulting from retailers' obligation to transmit prices in quasi-real-time. In my first article of this dissertation, I estimate the pass-through rates of the German gasoline tax reduction in 2022. I find a substantial variance in pass-through rates over time and space. The average pass-through was very high but was incomplete for all fuel types. The pass-through rates were systematically lower in rural regions and the south of Germany. In the second article, Thomas Wein and I focus on one German town's daily retail price cycles to explain what factors influence the probability of a retailer being the first to raise prices in the daily cycles. Our empirical results for the major brands Aral and Shell suggest that market power is the most crucial driver of the cyclical pricing pattern in the gasoline market. In my third article, I analyze local price competition along the extreme setting at the German-Polish border. I find no evidence that German retailers enter price competition with their Polish counterparts. My descriptive analysis of gasoline station infrastructure in the German border region reveals increasingly sparse gasoline station density when approaching the Polish border, along with an increasing share of premium brands. Overall, the dissertation emphasizes the importance of local factors for competition and suggests the potential exercise of market power in specific local markets.