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 these discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

This study evaluates the impact of fuel prices on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly registration of new private cars in France from 2003 to 2007. Detailed information on the car holder enables us to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers. We...

In this paper, we investigate whether French consumers have modified their preferences towards environmentally-friendly vehicles between 2003 and 2008. We estimate a model of demand for automobiles incorporating both consumers' heterogeneity and CO2 emissions of the vehicles. Our results show...

This paper presents a dynamic model for light motor vehicles. Consumers solve an optimal stopping problem in deciding if they want a new automobile and when in the model year to purchase it. This dynamic approach allows for determining how the mix of consumers evolves over the model year and for...

This paper examines how consumers react to the financial distress of durable goods manufacturers by looking at the Swedish new car market. We employ a difference-in-differences matching methodology whereby we compare sales of carmaker Saab with those of a carefully constructed control group of...

This paper documents the basic features of data on motor vehicles from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey. Despite some methodological differences between the two surveys, we find that they yield strikingly...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate, via an empirical example, how to obtain point estimates of price elasticities for differentiated products using a single cross section of product level data. Bajari and Benkard (2005) use revealed-preference bounds for the taste coefficients. In order to...

This paper examines how a Korean automobile firm price-discriminates between the Korean and the U.S. markets. We argue that a Korean automobile firm's pricing behavior depends on the differences in price elasticity over the segmented markets between the countries. Our findings are that...

We investigate the effects of 2015 Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal in the Taiwanese new car market. Using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy and administrative data on new car registrations, we find that quarterly sales of Volkswagen fell by more than 20% in self-use market. But...

In December 2003, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that sought comments on suggested changes to the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) program. Among other regulatory concepts, NHTSA suggested that future CAFE...