The relationship between spot and futures oil prices: Do structural breaks matter?

This paper examines the effect of structural breaks on the spot–futures oil prices relationship. We explore the impact of structural breaks on four critical issues, including cointegrating relationships, market efficiency under the expectation hypothesis and the no arbitrage rule, causalities, and forecasting performance of futures oil volatility. As far as our empirical results exhibit, the structural break we detect endogenously causes some influences on these issues, which is in sharp contrast to the conclusions of existing studies. Our findings offer some implications and suggestions to researchers, investors, and policymakers.