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Travel and gas prices a look at the impact on rv visits to national parks. Ansmann, Markus; Booth, Lawrence; Firestine, Theresa; Laptev, Nikolay; Smedsrud, Berthe ; Tang, Lingli University of California Santa Barbara. Department of Economics. Overview. Project Description
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Travel and gas pricesa look at the impact on rv visits to national parks Ansmann, Markus; Booth, Lawrence; Firestine, Theresa; Laptev, Nikolay; Smedsrud, Berthe; Tang, Lingli University of California Santa Barbara. Department of Economics
Overview • Project Description • Determine the relationship between national gas prices and decline in RV visits to National Parks. • Surprising results are found which contradict claims made by several news posts, including the Denver Post. • Project Methodology • Pre-Whiten. Granger Causality. Forecast • Key Findings/Results • No evidence of impact of gas prices on RV N.P. visits. • Forecasted RV visits in the future. • Conclusion • Possible explanation: Change of preferences.
Project Description • Objective • Discover relationship between RV visits to National Parks. • Results • No relationship between monthly gas prices and the monthly number of RV visits from 1983.01 to 2006.12 • Suggests that the media’s claim of gas prices changing RV camper’s preferences is wrong. • Forecast
Procedure/Methodology (1) Fig1: (L to R) Month to month gas prices. Pre-whitened gas prices. To pre-whiten we take the log, season difference and difference our data.
Procedure/Methodology (2) Fig2: Month to month changes in RV visits to national parks. The graph above includes both time series and pre-whitened time-series.
Key Findings/Results 1 Fig 3: We cannot reject the null based on the F stats and its critical value.
Model Estimation/Result 2 Fig 4: Estimated, orthogonal, model for pre-whitened gas
Model Estimation/Result 3 Fig 5: Suspect ARCH term (on the left) so we estimate a new model (on the right)
Forecast of Gas Prices/Result 4a Fig 6b: Sample comparison of the goodness of fit of our model. Units are in a relative metric. Fig 6a: The goodness of fit of our model (in-sample forecast).
Forecast of Gas Prices/Result 4b Fig 6c: Forecasted gas prices including the 95% confidence interval Fig 6d: Predicting gas will cost less over the summer.
Model Estimation/Result 5 Fig 6: Model for RV Campers
Model Estimation/Result 6 Fig 7: ARCH not necessary
Forecast of RV Visits/Result 7a Fig 8b: Sample comparison of the goodness of fit of our model. Units are in number of campers per month Fig 8a: The goodness of fit of our model.
Forecast of RV Visits/Result 7b Fig 9b: As expected, incredible numbers over the summer, and surprisingly low numbers in December. Fig 9a: Forecasted RV N.P. visits including the 95% confidence interval
Conclusion • Change of preferences of RV National Park campers fuel the decline in visits per month. • Gas prices do not influence RV campers. • Lowest visits to National Parks during the month of December • Gas prices expected to decline this summer