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.
Human Capital Accounting in the United States: 1994 to 2006
This paper presents measures of the human capital stock and of investment in human capital for the United States between 1994 and 2006. When both market and non-market production are included, the stock of human capital was equal to about three quarters of a quadrillion dollars in 2006, of which… Read more
Price Discrimination and Business-Cycle Risk
A parsimonious theoretical model of second degree price discrimination suggests that the business cycle will affect the degree to which firms are able to price discriminate between different consumer types. We analyze price dispersion in the airline industry to assess how price discrimination… Read more
Price Indexes for Drugs: A Review of the Issues
The Rise of Vertical Specialization Trade
Manufacturing and vertical specialization (VS) trade, trade in goods that incorporate imported inputs, has grown rapidly since the 1960s. I argue that declining trade costs are an important explanation for these facts. I present a three stage vertical specialization trade model, with raw… Read more
GDP and Beyond: Measuring Economic Progress and Sustainability
The United States possesses some of the most highly developed sets of gross domestic product (GDP) accounts in the world. These accounts—which are collectively know as the national income product and wealth accounts or national accounts—have been regularly updated over the years and have well… Read more
Collection of data on income and other taxes in surveys of U.S. multinational enterprises
Supplemental Materials:
- Tables (XLS)
Terms of Trade Effects: Theory and Methods of Measurement
Foreign trade enables a nation to consume a different mix of goods and services than it produces, so to measure real gross domestic income (GDI) for an open economy, we must deflate by an index of the prices of the things that this income is used to buy, not the price index for GDP. The… Read more
Metropolitan Area Disposable Personal Income – Methodology and Results for 2001-2007
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes annual statistics of state disposable personal income, the difference between state personal income and state personal current taxes. BEA also publishes annual statistics of personal income for sub-state areas, but BEA does not publish… Read more
Declines in the Volatility of the US Economy; A Detailed Look
This paper uses GDP-by-state and industry data, and looks at the decline in volatility of the U.S. economy that occurred in about 1984. It finds that this decline primarily results from declines in covariances between industries, or between states, rather than declines in variances of the… Read more
Accrual Measures of Pension-Related Compensation and Wealth of State and Local Government Workers
This paper develops a method to convert the normal costs and actuarial liabilities published by state and local government retirement systems for their defined benefit pension plans to measures consistent with national income accounting principles. It also standardizes the measures using a… Read more