Report
Interest rates and the market for new light vehicles
Maccini, Louis J.; Hall, George J.; Copeland, Adam (2015-09-01)
We study the impact of interest rates changes on both the demand for and supply of new light vehicles in an environment where consumers and manufacturers face their own interest rates. An increase in the consumers? interest rate raises their cost of financing and thus lowers the demand for new vehicles. An increase in the manufacturers? interest rate raises their cost of holding inventories. Both channels have equilibrium effects that are amplified and propagated over time through inventories, which serve as a way to both smooth production and facilitate greater sales at a given price. ...
Staff Reports , Paper 741

Journal Article
Accounting for the federal government's cost of funds
Sargent, Thomas J.; Hall, George J. (1997-07)
This article describes and defends the authors' corrections to the federal government's flawed measure of its cost of funds. Further, it examines how the maturity structure of the debt influences the way inflation risk and interest rate risk are shared by the government and its creditors.
Economic Perspectives , Volume 21 , Issue Jul

Working Paper
Non-convex costs and capital utilization: a study of production and inventories at automobile assembly plants
Hall, George J. (1996)
This paper studies how managers at automobile assembly plants organize production across time. Detailed data from eleven single-source automobile assembly plants display considerable cross-plant heterogeneity. At plants which make low- and medium-selling vehicles the capital stock often sits idle, production is more variable than sales, and weeklong shutdowns are often used to vary output. In contrast, at plants which make high-selling vehicles, the capital stock rarely sits idle, production is about as variable as sales, and overtime - not weeklong shutdowns - is most frequently used to vary ...
Working Paper Series, Macroeconomic Issues , Paper WP-96-25

Working Paper
Overtime, effort and the propagation of business cycle shocks
Hall, George J. (1994)
This paper presents and estimates a variant of Hansen and Sargent's (1988) real business cycle model with straight time and overtime. The model presented has only one latent variable, the state of technology, yet it does a better job propagating and magnifying shocks than the labor hoarding models which incorporate unobserved effort. This model, as well as a version of Burnside, Eichenbaum and Rebelo's (1993) labor hoarding model, is estimated using maximum likelihood. The maximum likelihood parameter estimates are compared to those using GMM.
Working Paper Series, Macroeconomic Issues , Paper 94-25

Working Paper
Prices, production, and inventories over the automotive model year
Hall, George J.; Dunn, Wendy E.; Copeland, Adam (2005)
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 typically fall over the model year at a 9.2 percent annual rate. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump shaped. To explain these time series, we formulate a market equilibrium model for new automobiles in which inventory and pricing decisions are made simultaneously. On the demand side, we use micro-level data to estimate time-varying aggregate demand curves for each vehicle. On the supply side, ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2005-25