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Working Paper
COVID-19 and Auto Loan Origination Trends
We study the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on auto loan origination activity during 2020. We focus on the dynamic impact of the crisis across lending channels, Equifax Risk Score (Risk Score) segments, and relevant geographic characteristics such as urbanization rate. We measure a significant drop in auto loan originations in March‒April followed by a near rebound in May‒June. Originations remain slightly depressed until October and fall again in November‒December. We document the largest drop and the smallest rebound in the subprime segment. We do not find any suggestive evidence that ...
Newsletter
Why the Automotive Chip Crisis Isn't Over (Yet)
New car buyers face limited inventory, long order wait times, and rising prices primarily because of lingering automotive supply chain disruptions. It is difficult for automakers to produce enough vehicles to meet demand, and the main culprit is reported to be the lack of semiconductors—or chips. Professional forecasters have ratcheted down their sales and production predictions as the months go by, and the supply-constrained conditions have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. In this article, I investigate why the chip crisis is still with us and why some forecasts suggest that it will ...
Working Paper
Spin-offs: theory and evidence from the early U.S. automobile industry
We develop "passive learning" model of firm entry by spin-off : firm employees leave their employer and create a new firm when (a) they learn they are good entrepreneurs (type I spin-offs) or (b) they learn their employer's prospects are bad (type II spin-offs). Our theory predicts a high correlation between spin-offs and parent exit, especially when the parent is a low-productivity firm. This correlation may correspond to two types of causality: spin-off causes firm exit (type I spin-offs) and firm exit causes spin-offs (type II spin-offs). We test and confirm this and other model ...
Report
The dynamics of automobile expenditures
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 measuring consumers' substitution patterns across products and time. I find that temporal substitution is significant, driving consumers' entry into and exit from the market. Through counterfactuals, I show that because consumers will temporarily substitute to a large degree, failure to account for ...
Responding to the Childcare Needs of Shift Workers: Examples from the Automotive Industry
Building cars, trucks, SUVs, and automotive parts is not a nine-to-five job. Almost all automotive manufacturing plants run production on two or more shifts or crews per day, and it is not uncommon for auto workers to work second or third shifts, “swing” shifts (that rotate between day and night shifts), or to occasionally work overtime to meet production demands. If you’re an auto manufacturing worker and a parent, working these non-standard hours (defined as anything outside of regular Monday to Friday daytime hours) poses unique challenges in finding quality, available, and flexible ...
Report
The production impact of "cash-for-clunkers": implications for stabilization policy
Stabilization policies frequently aim to boost spending as a means to increase GDP. Spending does not necessarily translate into production, however, especially when inventories are involved. We look at the ?cash-for-clunkers? program that helped finance the purchase of nearly 700,000 vehicles in 2009. An analysis of auto sales and production movements reveals that the program did prompt a large spike in sales. But the program had only a modest and fleeting impact on production, as inventories buffered the movements in sales. These findings suggest caution in judging the efficacy of such ...
Working Paper
Charged and Almost Ready—What Is Holding Back the Resale Market for Battery Electric Vehicles?
We utilize vehicle registration microdata for all new and used vehicles registered in the U.S. for model years 2010-2022 to study the market for used battery electric vehicles (BEVs). From these records, we establish two stylized facts: 1) BEVs enter the used market at the slowest rate compared to any other powertrain technology, and 2) BEVs are driven significantly less than vehicles featuring other powertrain technologies. We connect these facts through a statistical model of used vehicle registration counts and find that there are significant behavioral differences between BEV and other ...
Working Paper
Evidence on the Within-Industry Agglomeration of R&D, Production, and Administrative Occupations
To date, most empirical studies of industrial agglomeration rely on data where observations are assigned an industry code based on classification systems such as NAICS in North America and NACE in Europe. This study combines industry data with occupation data to show that there are important differences in the spatial patterns of occupation groups within the widely used industry definitions. We focus on workers in manufacturing industries, whose occupations almost always fit into three groups: production, administrative, or R&D. We then employ two approaches to document the spatial ...
Working Paper
Conspicuous Consumption: Vehicle Purchases by Non-Prime Consumers
Consumers with higher income often spend more on luxury goods. As a result, lower-income consumers who seek to increase their perceived income and social status may be motivated to purchase conspicuous luxury goods. Lower-income consumers may also desire to emulate the visible consumption displayed by their wealthier peers. Using a unique vehicle financing dataset, we find that consumers with lower credit scores value vehicle brand prestige more than average consumers. The stronger preferences for prestige lead non-prime consumers to purchase more expensive vehicles than they otherwise would ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Vehicle Fuel Economy Standards on Technology Adoption
Many countries are tightening passenger vehicle fuel economy standards. The literature on passenger vehicle standards has used structural models to estimate their welfare effects. This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of recently tightened fuel economy standards on technology adoption. Specifically, it investigates changes in the rate and direction of technology adoption, that is, the extent to which technology is used to increase fuel economy at the expense of other vehicle attributes. We find that recent U.S. and European standards have both increased the rate of ...