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....

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...

Using an original data source, this paper investigates the circumstances under which firms adopt computer numerical control (CNC), an important type of flexible automation which can significantly increase productivity, product variety and quality. The paper shows that arms'-length...

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...

Cars have gotten bigger and faster yet more fuel efficient in recent decades. Why? We estimate an equilibrium model of car attribute production using U.S. household microdata for 1995-2017 and structurally decompose attribute trends into underlying mechanisms. We find that technical change led...

This paper examines the impact of industrial policies (IPs) on innovation in the global automobile industry. We compile the first comprehensive dataset linking global IPs with patent data related to the auto industry from 2008 to 2023. We document a major shift in policy focus: by 2022, nearly...

This paper studies the within-model-year pricing and production of new automobiles. Using new monthly data on U.S. transaction prices, we document that for the typical new vehicle, prices fall over the model year at a 9.2 percent annual rate. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump...

Automobile manufacturers make frequent use of promotions that give cash-back payments. Two common types of cash-back promotions are rebates to customers, which are widely publicized to potential customers, and discounts to dealers, which are not publicized. While the payments nominally go...

Recent papers by Kim and Nelson (1999) and McConnell and Perez-Quiros (2000) uncover a dramatic decline in the volatility of U.S. GDP growth beginning in 1984. Determining whether the source is good luck, good policy or better inventory management has since developed into an active area of...

We use daily administrative data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new models to the auto assembly line. We first show that costly defects per vehicle spike when new models are introduced. As a response, the firm trains in problem-solving...