Do consumers value the fuel economy of cars? In this paper we examine this question, taking advantage of the recent introduction of hybrid and battery-electric vehicles, which promise to reduce the use of fossil fuels in road transport, and hence carbon emissions and dependence on oil imports....

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...

There is no doubt that protectionism costs. But it is less clear exactly how much it costs and who pays. And while protectionism results in a deadweight loss — there are more losers than winners — some individuals and groups gain from protectionism. And it is those who stand to gain who have...

We use online search data to predict car sales in the German and UK automobile industries. Search data subsume several distinct search motives, which are not separately observable. We develop a model linking search motives to observable search data and sales. The model shows that predictions of...

Consumers with higher income often spend more on luxury goods. As a result, lower-income consumers who seek to increase their perceived income status may be motivated to purchase conspicuous luxury goods. They may also desire to emulate the visible consumption displayed by their wealthier peers....

We study how the historical memories of war affect consumer choices of brands from different country-of-origins in the context of the Chinese automotive market. Our research design exploits two natural experiments: (i) the Imperial Japanese Army's Continental Cross-Through Operation in 1944 in...

Can heuristic information processing affect important product markets? We explore whether the tendency to focus on the left-most digit of a number affects how used car buyers incorporate odometer values in their purchase decisions. Analyzing over 22 million wholesale used-car transactions, we...

To measure how consumers respond to negative information about the financial health of a durable-goods producer, I use the prices at which vehicles sell in secondary markets to quantify consumer perception of the Chrysler Corporation during the period surrounding the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act...

Governments all over the world have invested tens of billions of dollars in car scrappage programs to fuel the economy in 2009. We investigate the German case using a unique micro transaction dataset covering the years 2007 to 2010. Our focus is on the incidence of the subsidy, i.e., we ask how...

We study the impact of fuel taxes and kilometer taxes on households' choices of vehicle quality, on their demand for kilometers driven, and on fuel consumption. Moreover, embedding this information in a model of the car market, we analyze the implications of these taxes for the opportunity costs...