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Automobiles on Steroids: Product Attribute Trade-Offs and Technological Progress in the Automobile Sector
Open accessAbstract
This paper estimates the technological progress that has occurred since 1980 in the automobile industry and the trade-offs faced when choosing between fuel economy, weight, and engine power characteristics. The results suggest that if weight, horsepower, and torque were held at their 1980 levels, fuel economy could have increased by nearly 60 percent from 1980 to 2006. Once technological progress is considered, meeting the CAFE standards adopted in 2007 will require halting the trend in weight and engine power characteristics, but little more. In contrast, the standards recently announced by the new administration, while attainable, require nontrivial "downsizing.” JEL: L50, L60
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Cited by
Carbon Taxes, Path Dependency, and Directed Technical Change: Evidence from the Auto Industry
Aghion, P., Dechezleprêtre, A., Hémous, D., Martin, R., & Van Reenen, J. (2016) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/684581 · Cited by 1,604
Gasoline prices, fuel economy, and the energy paradox
Allcott, H., & Wozny, N. (2014) · Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.1162/rest_a_00419 · Cited by 504
Grubb, M., Drummond, P., Poncia, A., McDowall, W., Popp, D., Samadi, S., Penasco, C., Gillingham, K. T., Smulders, S., Glachant, M., et al. (2021) · Environmental Research Letters · doi:10.1088/1748-9326/abde07 · Cited by 173
Zheng, G., & Peng, Z. (2021) · Energy Reports · doi:10.1016/j.egyr.2021.02.039 · Cited by 74
Wang, Y., & Miao, Q. (2021) · Resource and Energy Economics · doi:10.1016/j.reseneeco.2020.101211 · Cited by 38
Metadata
- Authors
- Knittel, C. R.
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2011-12-01
- Volume
- 101
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 3368-3399
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3122153822
- Cited by
- 270
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 7.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- Knittel, C. R. (2011). Automobiles on Steroids: Product Attribute Trade-Offs and Technological Progress in the Automobile Sector. American Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.7.3368
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
