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Working Paper
The 2008 U.S. Auto Market Collapse
New vehicle sales in the U.S. fell nearly 40 percent during the past recession, causing significant job losses and unprecedented government interventions in the auto industry. This paper explores three potential explanations for this decline: increasing oil prices, falling home values, and falling household income expectations. First, we use the historical macroeconomic relationship between oil prices and vehicle sales to show that the oil price spike explains roughly 15 percent of the auto sales decline between 2007 and 2009. Second, we establish that declining home values explain only a ...
Working Paper
The 2008 U.S. Auto Market Collapse
New vehicle sales in the U.S. fell nearly 40 percent during the last recession, causing significant job losses and unprecedented government interventions in the auto industry. This paper explores two potential explanations for this decline: falling home values and falling households? income expectations. First, we establish that declining home values explain only a small portion of the observed reduction in vehicle sales. Using a county-level panel from the episode, we ?nd: (1) A one-dollar fall in home values reduced new vehicle spending by about 0.9 cents; and (2) Falling home values ...
Journal Article
U.S. Inflation Inequality between 2010 and 2023
Following the literature that uses data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the consumer price index, this article examines U.S. households’ inflation experiences during the recent period from 2010 to 2023. We construct group-specific market baskets to reflect diverse spending patterns and identify key differences in inflation. Our main finding is that, although average inflation was higher and more volatile during this period, inflation inequality remained stable or even declined compared with the earlier period. Nevertheless, despite the overall similarity in households’ inflation ...