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...

Firms sometimes comply with externality-correcting policies by gaming the measure that determines policy. We show theoretically that such gaming can benefit consumers, even when it induces them to make mistakes, because gaming leads to lower prices by reducing costs. We use our insights to...

The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which was experiencing disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design, we show...

US households’ consumption and car purchases collapsed during the Great Recession, for reasons that are still poorly understood. In this paper we use the Consumer Expenditure Survey to derive cohort and business cycle decompositions of consumption profiles. When decomposing the car expenditure...

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...

Notches --- where small changes in behavior lead to large changes in a tax or subsidy --- figure prominently in many policies, but have been rarely examined by economists. In this paper, we analyze a class of notches associated with policies aimed at improving vehicle fuel economy. We provide...

New car fleet fuel economy, weight and engine power have changed drastically since 1980. These changes represent both movements along and shifts in the "fuel economy/weight/engine power production possibilities frontier". This paper estimates the technological progress that has occurred since...

The beginning of the twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to explore the interaction of rapid technological progress and trade barriers in shaping the worldwide diffusion of a new, highly traded good: the automobile. We scrape historical data on the quantity and value of passenger...

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...

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....