Governments all over the world have invested tens of billions of dollars in car scrappage programs to fuel the economy in 2009. We investigate the German case using a unique micro transaction dataset covering the years 2007 to 2010. Our focus is on the incidence of the subsidy, i.e., we ask how...

In this note we examine how vertical relationships are related to the efficiency of the operations in the automotive production chain. We first provide an overview of the nature of supplier arrangements by comparing current practices in the countries Japan, US, and Germany. Current best...

Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between "dirty" (internal combustion engine) and "clean" (e.g. electric and hybrid) patents across 80 countries over several decades. We show that...

The paper addresses entry barriers for a new technology – hydrogen powered cars or cars with fuel cell engines – if the network of its filling stations is missing. We use Hotelling’s model of product differentiation to characterize a situation where an incumbent firm produces the old...

Die deutsche Automobilindustrie steht vor gravierenden Problemen: Nach einem langanhaltenden Zuwachs bei Produktion und Export droht sie ihre dominierende Stellung durch die internationalen Handelsstreitigkeiten zu verlieren. Aber auch die Anforderungen durch die europäischen Klimaschutzziele...

Many authors have studied the influence exerted by tourism on the economy. Today, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are an important factor influencing competitiveness in the tourism sector and consumers' decision-making concerning tourism purchases. Along with the expansion of...

Due to federal regulations, automobile air bag availability was a model-specific discontinuous function of model year for used vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s. We use the discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

Can heuristic information processing affect important product markets? We explore whether the tendency to focus on the left-most digit of a number affects how used car buyers incorporate odometer values in their purchase decisions. Analyzing over 22 million wholesale used-car transactions, we...