Papers & Working Papers

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 Calderón and Rassier 2022. Preliminary studies in this series focus on tax data, individual credit data, and driving data.

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 fixed capital, leading to lower levels, and slightly slower growth rates, of Net Domestic Product. We use Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood regressions to estimate this expectation and generate our experimental measure of costs.

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 developing macroeconomic measures of marketing investments and stocks for the United States. We also construct and analyze measures of how marketing and other intangibles contribute to output growth in the 61 industries that comprise the U.S. private business sector.

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 to data on spending growth at the condition level from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Health Care Satellite Account (HCSA). We find our proxy for innovation is significantly related to spending growth, even after accounting for a number of factors.

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 identifying the economies that are the ultimate destinations, or hosts, of direct investment. BEA’s initial effort to produce U.S.

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) produces economic statistics through its system of satellite accounts that highlight specialized areas of the economy that are not directly apparent in BEA’s official economic statistics published under the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), such as outdoor recreation and arts and culture.

The U.S. gross domestic product and its foundational National Income and Product Accounts contain some of the most widely used and followed economic statistics in the world yet contain limited information on the labor market and almost no information on demographic groups. We build a new dataset that includes labor market data cross-classified by sex, age, education, and industry and integrate this into the National and Industry Economic Accounts. To overcome small sample size issues for poorly measured demographic groups, we apply small area estimation to refine the estimates.

Measuring the digital economy is a high priority for analysts of economic growth. We augment the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Digital Economy Satellite Account to include digital services provided by high-tech consumer durables. We find that including the service flow from these goods raises the growth rate of the digital economy between 2005 and 2021 from 6.4 percent per year to 6.9 percent per year. Consumer durable services accounted for about 10 percent of digital economy GDP within augmented digital economy GDP.