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The 2008 U.S. Auto Market Collapse

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Abstract

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 explain approximately 19 percent of the aggregate vehicle spending decline. Next, examining state-level data from 1997-2016, we ?nd: (3) The short-run responses of vehicle consumption to home value changes are larger in the 2005-2011 period relative to other years, but at longer horizons (e.g. 5 years), the responses are similar across the two sub-periods; and (4) The service ?ow from vehicles, as measured from miles traveled, responds very little to house price shocks. We also detail the sources of the di?erences between our ?ndings (1) and (2) from existing research. Second, we establish that declining current and expected future income expectations played an important role in the auto market?s collapse. We build a permanent income model augmented to include infrequent, repeated car buying. Our calibrated model matches the pre-recession distribution of auto vintages and exhibits a large vehicle sales decline in response to a moderate decline in expected permanent income. In response to the decline in permanent income, households delay replacing existing vehicles, allowing them smooth the e?ects of the income shock without signi?cantly adjusting the service ?ow from their vehicles. Combining our negative results regarding housing wealth with our positive model-based ?ndings, we interpret the auto market collapse as consistent with existing permanent income based approaches to durable goods consumption (e.g., Leahy and Zeira (2005)).

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  • Bill Dupor & Rong Li & M. Saif Mehkari & Yi-Chan Tsai, 2018. "The 2008 U.S. Auto Market Collapse," Working Papers 2018-19, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:2018-019
    DOI: doi.org/10.20955/wp.2018.019
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    Cited by:

    1. Kartik B. Athreya & Ryan Mather & Jose Mustre-del-Rio & Juan M. Sanchez, 2020. "Household Financial Distress and the Burden of ‘Aggregate’ Shocks," Research Working Paper RWP 20-13, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
    2. Harmenberg, Karl & Öberg, Erik, 2021. "Consumption dynamics under time-varying unemployment risk," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 350-365.
    3. Alessandro Gavazza & Andrea Lanteri, 2021. "Credit Shocks and Equilibrium Dynamics in Consumer Durable Goods Markets [“Balladurette and Juppette: A Discrete Analysis of Scrapping Subsidies”]," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 88(6), pages 2935-2969.
    4. Alisdair McKay & Johannes F. Wieland, 2021. "Lumpy Durable Consumption Demand and the Limited Ammunition of Monetary Policy," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(6), pages 2717-2749, November.
    5. Saraf, Shubham & Bera, Achinta, 2021. "A review on pore-scale modeling and CT scan technique to characterize the trapped carbon dioxide in impermeable reservoir rocks during sequestration," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).
    6. Adamos Adamou & Sofronis Clerides, 2021. "The evolution of car ownership in Cyprus," Cyprus Economic Policy Review, University of Cyprus, Economics Research Centre, vol. 15(1), pages 1-15, June.

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    JEL classification:

    • E27 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles

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