1. Kevin M. Camp, Michael Havlin, and Sara Stanley, "Automotive dealerships 2007-19: profit-margin compression and product innovation," Monthly Labor Review, October 2022, https://doi.org/10.21916/mlr.2022.26.
2. This article focuses on new-vehicle prices because supply-chain disruptions most proximally affected the manufacturing of new vehicles, rather than immediately causing shortages in the used-vehicle market. Used vehicles played an important role in the used-car shortage through their substitutability with new vehicles and merit attention in a separate analysis; however, the dynamics of the used-car market are quite distinct from those of the new-car market, and the used-car shortage is subordinate to the initial supply-chain shocks.
3. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Producer Price Index (PPI) program publishes several margins indexes for dealer services, including an index for total vehicle sales, new-vehicle sales, and used-vehicle sales. This analysis uses the BLS index for total vehicle sales because corroborating evidence from corporate financial data (see chart 5) shows that this index was a much better estimator of new-vehicle margins during the pandemic.
4. This relationship is demonstrated in Camp, Havlin, and Stanley, "Automotive dealerships 2007-19."
5. See ibid. Company-specific information is from the 10-K forms filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which are stored in the SEC EDGAR database (https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/).