International evidence on crude oil price dynamics: Applications of ARIMA-GARCH models

We examine the usefulness of several ARIMA-GARCH models for modeling and forecasting the conditional mean and volatility of weekly crude oil spot prices in eleven international markets over the 1/2/1997-10/3/2009 period. In particular, we investigate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of four volatility models - GARCH, EGARCH and APARCH and FIGARCH over January 2009 to October 2009. Forecasting results are somewhat mixed, but in most cases, the APARCH model outperforms the others. Also, conditional standard deviation captures the volatility in oil returns better than the traditional conditional variance. Finally, shocks to conditional volatility dissipate at an exponential rate, which is consistent with the covariance-stationary GARCH models than the slow hyperbolic rate implied by the FIGARCH alternative.