This paper discusses fuel economy regulations in the United States and other countries. We first describe how these programs affect the automobile market, including their impacts on fuel use and other dimensions of the vehicle fleet. We then review different methodologies for assessing the costs...

We document a strong correlation in the brand of automobile chosen by parents and their adult children, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. This correlation could represent transmission of brand preferences across generations, or it could result from correlation in family...

A full understanding of how gasoline prices affect consumer behavior frequently requires information on how consumers forecast future gasoline prices. We provide the first evidence on the nature of these forecasts by analyzing two decades of data on gasoline price expectations from the Michigan...

A full understanding of how gasoline prices affect consumer behavior frequently requires information on how consumers forecast future gasoline prices. We provide the first evidence on the nature of these forecasts by analyzing two decades of data on gasoline price expectations from the Michigan...

Estimating the cost of regulation is difficult. Firms sometimes reveal costs indirectly, however, when they exploit loopholes to avoid regulation. We apply this insight to fuel economy standards for automobiles. These standards feature a loophole that gives automakers a bonus when they equip a...

This paper analyzes the predictive power of a new data set of consumer gasoline price forecasts taken from the Michigan Survey of Consumers (MSC). MSC data generally perform as well as a no-change forecast in predicting future gasoline prices, and they substantially out-perform the no-change...

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations constrain automakers to produce vehicles whose average efficiency exceeds a minimum standard. A “loophole" in the program allows firms to relax this constraint by producing gasoline-ethanol flexible-fuel vehicles, which are credited with far...

We consider a health authority seeking to allocate annual budgets optimally over time to minimize the discounted social cost of infection(s) evolving in a finite set of groups. This optimization problem is challenging since the standard SIS epidemiological model describing the spread of the...