The number of different car and light truck models produced in North America has increased enormously over the last decades. The data suggests that producing this increased variety of vehicles is associated with a productivity penalty. We show that manufacturers can adopt complementary...

Mankiw [1982] explores the Permanent Income Hypothesis implication that durable expenditures follow an ARMA(1,1) representation. He finds that durable expenditures are represented by an AR(1) process which implies that the rate of depreciation of durables, under the PIH model, is 100%. This...

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...

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...

We study the interplay between autonomous transportation, carpooling, and road pricing. We discuss how improvements in these technologies, and interactions among them, will affect transportation markets. Our main results show how to achieve socially efficient outcomes in such markets, taking...

Many transportation policies indirectly affect vehicle travel and resulting externalities by inducing changes in vehicle scrappage rates. We leverage the staggered removal of state-level safety inspection programs across the United States within an instrumental variables (IV) framework to...

Illiquidity in short-term credit markets during the financial crisis might have severely curtailed the supply of non-bank consumer credit. Using a new data set linking every car sold in the United States to the credit supplier involved in each transaction, we find that the collapse of the...

A family of integer programs is considered whose right-hand-sides lie on a given line segment L. This family is called a parametric integer program (PIP). Solving a (PIP) means finding an optimal solution for every program in the family. It is shown how a simple generalization of the...

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...

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...