The U.S. auto supplier industry in transition

Evolving relations between carmakers and their parts suppliers have resulted in local, regional, and international shifts in the location of production. An upcoming Chicago Fed conference in Detroit will examine these ongoing structural changes, which are affecting the prospects for the U.S. auto industry’s continued concentration in the Midwest.Automobile supplies industry

Competition and trade in the U.S. auto parts sector

Exports of U.S. made auto parts have stalled in recent years, while import levels of auto parts have continued to increase. The authors detail the magnitude and destination of U.S. imports and exports of specific auto parts in order to assess the challenges facing U.S. parts suppliers.Automobile supplies industry ; Automobile industry and trade

Contingent Valuation, Hypothetical Bias, and Experimental Economics

Although the contingent valuation method has been widely used to value a diverse array of nonmarket environmental and natural resource commodities, recent empirical evidence suggests it may not accurately estimate real economic values. The hypothetical nature of environmental valuation surveys typically results in responses that are significantly greater than actual payments. Economists have had mixed success in developing techniques designed to control for this "hypothetical bias." This paper highlights the role of experimental economics in addressing hypothetical bias, and identifies a gap in the existing literature by focusing on the underlying causes of this bias. Most of the calibration techniques used today lack a theoretical justification, and therefore these procedures need to be used with caution. We argue that future experimental research should investigate the reasons hypothetical bias persists. A better understanding of the causes should enhance the effectiveness of calibration techniques.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Whose part is it? - Measuring domestic content of vehicles

Today, the distinction between “American” and “foreign” vehicles is not so clear: Some models produced by the American-owned Detroit Three carmakers have a smaller share of domestic parts than models produced by foreign-owned carmakers. This article examines how much domestic content goes into motor vehicles sold in the U.S.Automobile industry and trade ; Automobile industry and trade - Finance

The supplier industry in transition - the new geography of auto production

On April 18 and 19, 2006, the Chicago Fed held a conference at its Detroit Branch to examine the ongoing structural changes in the U.S. auto industry. As suppliers play an increasingly central role in auto production, it has become crucial for carmakers to have a strong relationship with their supply base.Automobile supplies industry

A Comparison of Induced Value and Home-Grown Value Experiments to Test for Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation

This study tests the hypothesis that hypothetical bias may not be related to value elicitation; rather it may be a value formation problem. When participants are asked to indicate their willingness to pay for an induced value good, we find no evidence of hypothetical bias for three different commodity types (public good, private good, and publicly provided private good). However, when these same subjects are asked to value homegrown goods with no pre-assigned induced value using the same elicitation mechanism, hypothetical values are roughly double actual payments in all three cases. These results support the hypothesis that the process of forming values in a homegrown setting may be a key contributor to hypothetical bias.contingent valuation, hypothetical bias, experiments, induced values, home-grown values

Computation of laminar viscous-inviscid interactions in high-speed internal flows

A review is given of computations for a series of nominally 2-D laminar viscous-inviscid interactions. Comparisons were made with detailed experimental shock tunnel results. The shock wave boundary layer interactions considered were induced by a compression ramp in one case and by an externally generated incident shock in the second case. In general, good agreement was reached between the grid refined calculations and experiment for the incipient and small separation conditions. For the highly separated flow, 3-D calculations which included the finite span effects of the experiment were required in order to obtain agreement with the data

An Adaptive Total Variation Algorithm for Computing the Balanced Cut of a Graph

We propose an adaptive version of the total variation algorithm proposed in [3] for computing the balanced cut of a graph. The algorithm from [3] used a sequence of inner total variation minimizations to guarantee descent of the balanced cut energy as well as convergence of the algorithm. In practice the total variation minimization step is never solved exactly. Instead, an accuracy parameter is specified and the total variation minimization terminates once this level of accuracy is reached. The choice of this parameter can vastly impact both the computational time of the overall algorithm as well as the accuracy of the result. Moreover, since the total variation minimization step is not solved exactly, the algorithm is not guarantied to be monotonic. In the present work we introduce a new adaptive stopping condition for the total variation minimization that guarantees monotonicity. This results in an algorithm that is actually monotonic in practice and is also significantly faster than previous, non-adaptive algorithms

Multiclass Total Variation Clustering

Ideas from the image processing literature have recently motivated a new set of clustering algorithms that rely on the concept of total variation. While these algorithms perform well for bi-partitioning tasks, their recursive extensions yield unimpressive results for multiclass clustering tasks. This paper presents a general framework for multiclass total variation clustering that does not rely on recursion. The results greatly outperform previous total variation algorithms and compare well with state-of-the-art NMF approaches