Latest Research

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

By Marina Gindelsky, Gary Cornwall
Published

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

By Ana M. Aizcorbe, Daniel Ripperger-Suhler
Published

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

By Abe C. Dunn, Eric English, Kyle K. Hood, Lowell Mason, Brian Quistorff
Published

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

By Jon D. Samuels, Corby Garner, Justin Harper
Published