Selling gasoline as a by-product : the impact of market structure on local prices

We use a novel data set with exact price quotes from virtually all German gasoline stations to empirically investigate how a temporary variance in local market structure - induced by restricted opening hours of specific players - affects price competition. We focus on stations selling gasoline as a by-product and find that, during their exogenously determined hours of opening, they have a significant negative price effect on nearby major-brand competitors. Applying a difference-in-difference framework with hourly average prices, our findings explicitly account for counterfactual market scenarios.