Papers
This page provides access to papers and presentations prepared by BEA staff. Abstracts are presented in HTML format; complete papers are in PDF format with selected tables in XLS format. The views expressed in these papers are solely those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis or the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Nowcasting Distributional National Accounts for the United States: A Machine Learning Approach
Inequality statistics are usually calculated from high-quality, comprehensive survey or administrative microdata. Naturally, this data is typically available with a lag of at least 9 months from the reference period. In turbulent times, there is interest in knowing the distributional impacts of… Read more
Do Price Deflators for High-Tech Goods Overstate Quality Change?
This paper studies chained price indexes for goods in high-tech sectors, how they handle quality change and whether they will likely suffer from chain drift issues. We argue that chained indexes do not handle quality change properly; though the underlying bilateral indexes hold quality constant… Read more
Expanding the Frontier of Economic Statistics Using Big Data: A Case Study of Regional Employment
Big data offers potentially enormous benefits for improving economic measurement, but it also presents challenges (e.g., lack of representativeness and instability), implying that their value is not always clear. We propose a framework for quantifying the usefulness of these data sources for… Read more
The Impact of Subsidies on Measuring Productivity and the Sources of Economic Growth
Taxes and subsidies drive a wedge between prices received and paid by producers and those paid by purchasers. Motivated by the large economic subsidies that were part of the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper introduces a new treatment for taxes and subsidies into the BEA-BLS… Read more
An Application of the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition to the Price Deflation Problem
We apply the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method used in the labor literature to split changes in average prices into inflation and quality components. The inflation measure is a full imputation Törnqvist price index. Using this index to deflate nominal spending properly allocates changes in the… Read more
Studies on the Value of Data
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has undertaken a series of studies that present methods for quantifying the value of simple data that can be differentiated from the complex data created by highly skilled workers that was studied in… Read more
The Increasing Pace of Weather-Related Cost Shocks: Should Net Domestic Product be Affected by Climate Disasters?
The monetary costs of weather and climate disasters in the U.S. grew rapidly from 1980 to 2022, rising more than five percent in real terms annually, and implying a faster depreciation of real assets. We argue that the expected depreciation from these events could be included in consumption of… Read more
Marketing, Other Intangibles, and Output Growth in 61 United States Industries
Experts in the System of National Accounts (SNA) recently considered whether marketing could be included as a capital asset in the national accounts and later recommended that marketing should be an intangible in the 2025 SNA (IMF, 2022; IMF, 2023). This paper contributes to that discussion by… Read more
A Direct Measure of Medical Innovation on Health Care Spending: A Condition-Specific Approach
While technological innovation is believed to be a key driver of spending growth, measuring this relationship is challenging. We address this challenge using a large database of cost-effectiveness studies, which we use to develop proxy measures of inno- vation for specific conditions. We connect… Read more
Experimental Ultimate Host Economy Statistics for U.S. Direct Investment Abroad
Following international guidelines, BEA statistics on bilateral U.S. direct investment abroad are compiled and presented by immediate partner economy. While this approach is well suited for many purposes, it can lead to difficulty in interpreting direct investment statistics, especially in… Read more