Replication Data for: Accelerator or Brake? Cash for Clunkers, Household Liquidity and Aggregate Demand

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Daniel Green, Harvard University. Harvard Business School. Division of Research; Brian Melzer, Dartmouth College; Jonathan Parker, MIT Sloan; Arcenis Rojas, United States Department of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Version: View help for Version V3

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
replication_files			09/04/2019 02:54:PM
ReplicationReadMe.docx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document	16.9 KB	09/04/2019 10:53:AM

Project Citation:

Green, Daniel, Melzer, Brian, Parker, Jonathan, and Rojas, Arcenis. Replication Data for: Accelerator or Brake? Cash for Clunkers, Household Liquidity and Aggregate Demand. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2020. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-11-02. https://doi.org/10.3886/E111706V3

Project Description

Summary: This replication package provides code and partial data necessary to replicate the results of this paper.

Replicating the results of this paper requires confidential non-public use data from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. Due to confidentiality concerns, the Consumer Expenditure Survey public use files do not include the model name of household vehicles, only the make and year. The model name is a private use variable, makemodel , and the only private variable used in the paper. The vehicle model name is used to determine the fuel efficiency of vehicles owned by households in the sample and determine their assignment to treatment or control groups. Because the assignment into treatment and control groups is based on fuel efficiency being slightly above or below a cutoff, the use of this private variable is central to the results of the paper and they cannot be replicated without it.

To aide in understanding how the code runs and results are generated, we have included code to generate a fake version of this private variable. This will allow the file clunkers_main.do to run the entire analysis and generate results, but these results will not match those of the paper because they use a randomly generated variable to assign households to treatment and control groups. Running the code without the BLS private variable is for expositional use only.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Fiscal stimulus; durable goods; consumption; household finance; liquidity constraints; debt capacity

JEL Classification:
      D14 Household Saving • Personal Finance
      E62 Fiscal Policy
      G18 Government Policy and Regulation
      H24 Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies
      H31 Household

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 6/1/2009 – 5/1/2010

Data Type(s): administrative records data; program source code; survey data

Methodology

Sampling: We begin with respondents to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and then limit the primary analysis to households who own a Clunker or Close-to-Clunker vehicle, as described in the Data and Methodology section of the manuscript referenced below.

Data Source: We use public and non-public data elements from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey.

Unit(s) of Observation: vehicle

Geographic Unit: state

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Published Versions

V3 [2020-11-02]

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