Papers

The users of the national income and product accounts (NIPAs) often compare the growth rates of NIPA profit measures with those of other publicly available measures of reported earnings, such as Standard & Poor's 500 earnings. Differences between the NIPA profit measures and the other… Read more

This paper discusses the data on U.S. intrafirm trade in goods collected in BEA's surveys of the operations of U.S. multinational firms and foreign-owned U.S. affiliates. It also examines patterns that emerge from the data, with a particular focus on the intrafirm-trade shares of U.S. exports… Read more

Accurate, quality adjusted prices for nonresidential structures are necessary for a good understanding of the functioning of the economy. In order to improve its estimates of nonresidential structures’ prices, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has developed new quality adjusted price indexes… Read more

This paper summarizes the progress the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has made in converting its paper-based survey data collection system to an electronic reporting system that collects data via the Internet. The paper describes the pilot program that resulted in BEA's Automated Survey… Read more

This paper looks at the U.S. experience and uses it as a benchmark for identifying the key questions that are being asked about the role and influence of MNC's and the types of statistics that are required to answer those questions. The paper goes on to assess whether the U.S. statistics that… Read more

This paper outlines BEA's program of data collection on the operations of U.S. parent companies, their foreign affiliates, and U.S. affiliates of foreign companies.  It also describes a number of related activities that organize the data in ways useful for analysis, derive additional,… Read more

This paper was prepared for the IMF’s Electronic Discussion Group on the Treatment of Nonperforming Loans in Macroeconomic Statistics. Due to the linkages between loan recognition and interest accrual, and between loan writeoffs and operating surplus, decisions that are reached regarding the… Read more

Retail industry product margin rates are used to estimate the retail output proportion of final consumption commodities. The Census Bureau collects data on industry margin rates, but it does not collect product margin rate data. To estimate retail industry-… Read more

The results presented in this paper are in line with the conclusions of past BEA studies of GDP revisions; they supplement the findings reported in Fixler and Grimm (2002). Some evidence that the revisions are predicable was found for the current quarterly estimates of GDP and final sales, but… Read more