摘要：Asymmetric price transmission, especially between vertically separated markets, has been a subject of considerable attention in agricultural economics. Asymmetric price transmission is not only important because it may point to gaps in economic theory, but also because its presence is often considered for policy purposes to be evidence of market failure. The focus of our research lies on the methods used to determine whether price transmission is asymmetric or symmetric. We analyse the behaviour of a variety of common tests for asymmetry in the presence of structural breaks in the underlying data. The hypothesis that we wish to test is that such anomalies in the underlying data can lead to overrejection of the null hypothesis of symmetric transmission. The results of Monte-Carlo experiments demonstrate that in the presence of structural breaks in symmetrically linked price data, tests will tend to reject the null hypothesis of symmetric transmission at the 5% level of significance in considerably more than 5% of a large number of repetitions. In other words, in the presence of structural breaks, it appears that the true size of tests for asymmetric price transmission is considerably larger than the chosen significance level. This implies that what in many studies appears to be asymmetric price transmission may in fact be due to other causes
