This paper elucidates, whether airfares respond asymmetrically to fuel price changes. Recent literature suggests conflicting evidence on whether airfares respond rapidly to the increase in fuel price than to the decrease. Using monthly U.S. data spreading over January 2000 to June 2019 and by employing a multiple threshold nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model, this paper doesn't surface any evidence of asymmetric adjustments of airfares to the changes in the prices of crude oil and jet fuel. Although the statistical results do not suggest a mechanism that conclusively identifies different adjustment rates in airfares relative to the difference in the prices for fuel, this absence does not support the presumption that the response of airfares to the changes in fuel prices is always symmetric. The results are quite robust to the splitting of the regressors into deciles.

本文阐明了机票是否对燃料价格变化做出不对称反应。最近的文献提出了相互矛盾的证据，即机票价格对燃油价格上涨的反应是否比对燃油价格下降的反应迅速。使用美国 2000 年 1 月至 2019 年 6 月的月度数据，并采用多阈值非线性自回归分布滞后模型，本文没有发现任何证据表明机票价格对原油和航空燃料价格的变化进行不对称调整。尽管统计结果并未表明一种机制可以最终确定相对于燃料价格差异的机票价格调整率，但这种缺失并不支持机票价格对燃料价格变化的反应总是对称的假设。