SEGMENT SHIFTS AND CAPACITY UTILIZATION IN THE U.S. AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY.
实证研究石油冲击导致的汽车需求结构变化如何与供给刚性相互作用，影响行业整体产能利用率，并考察资本和劳动力重新配置的速度。
An important school of thought argues that shifts may account for a substantial portion of aggregate fluctuations (e.g., David Lilien, 1982; Fischer Black, 1987; Steven Davis, 1987). Events such as the oil shocks of the 1970's, exchange-rate fluctuations, and shifts in government spending have their direct effect on the composition of economic activity. The sectoral-shift literature argues that they may affect the level and the dynamics of output and employment as well. The typical story is of a slowly functioning labor market. After a shock, search behavior, matching problems, and a time cost of switching slow the reallocation of workers across sectors. This focus, however, misses important elements of the reallocation problem. As Black (1987) has argued, not only sector-specific human capital, but also complementary physical and managerial (engineering, organization, etc.) capital must be reallocated or recreated in response to shocks. If jobs are linked to capital, then the slow adjustment of labor may be attributable in part to the sluggishness in the adjustment of capital. This paper presents an empirical study of the impact of oil-shock shifts within the U.S. automobile industry. From an analytical perspective, a sectoral shift is any event that raises desired output and employment in some sectors and lowers them in others. For our purposes, a sector is a size class of automobiles. Within the automobile industry, we will be able to study two distinct questions. First, did the oil-priceinduced shocks to the composition of demand interact with short-run rigidities in supply to limit industry-wide capacity utilization? We will quantify the extent to which the changing composition of demand was reflected in a lower aggregate output level, with obvious consequences for the employment of capital and of labor and for the return to firms' knowledge capital. Our second question concerns the pace of the intermediate-run adjustment to shocks. How rapidly could capital and labor be reallocated to new demand conditions? Such considerations determine the impact of shocks on employment and capacity-utilization dynamics.