The United States consumed more petroleum-based liquid fuel per capita than any other OECD-high-income country - 30 percent more than the second-highest country (Canada) and 40 percent more than the third-highest (Luxemburg). This paper examines the main channels through which reductions in U.S....

Policy-makers have instituted a variety of fuel economy tax policies -- polices that tax or subsidize new vehicle purchases on the basis of fuel economy performance -- in the hopes of improving fleet fuel economy and reducing gasoline consumption. This article reviews existing policies and...

Fuel economy standards change the composition of the vehicle fleet, potentially influencing accident safety. I introduce a model of the fleet that captures risks across interactions between vehicle types while simultaneously recovering estimates of unobserved driving safety behavior. The model...

This paper focuses on how changes in the economic and regulatory environment have affected production costs and product characteristics in the automobile industry. We estimate cost functions characteristics. Then we examine how this cost surface has changed over time and how these changes relate...

This paper tries to make sense of the recent trade dispute between the U.S. and Japan in autos and auto parts. The paper argues that there are structural differences between the way that the auto industries are organized in the U.S. and Japan, and that these differences have contributed to the...

This paper examines the political process through which the U.S. auto industry pursued and ultimately received protection from Japanese competition. Following a brief review of research on the competitiveness of the industry (section II) and on the effects of protection on industry performance...

Regional trade agreements must specify domestic-content rules (rules of origin) that define the conditions under which a good qualifies as 'domestic' and so may be freely traded within the block. The paper analyzes such rules, focussing in particular on oligopolistic industries in which foreign...

In this paper we utilize a three component model of the automotive industry to simulate the impacts of various trade policy scenarios, such as changes in tariffs and quotas, on the U.S. and Canadian motor vehicle sectors as compared to their Japanese competitors. The three components are a cost...

This paper considers the likely effect on the automobile industry of a free trade agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. As there are currently large restrictions on imports into Mexico, one important outcome of a free trade agreement would be the opening of the Mexican market to U.S. producers....

We examine the sensitivity of simple calibration models of trade in imperfectly competitive industries to changes in model specification, as well as to changes in the calibration parameters. We find that not just the magnitude, but also the sign of the optimal trade policies is very sensitive to...