Developing Experimental State Quarterly Personal Consumption Expenditures

BEA produces annual personal consumption expenditures (PCE) by state statistics, providing critical insights into households’ consumption at the state level. These statistics, however, are produced with a 10-month lag. To address this issue, ongoing research by BEA’s Regional Economics Directorate has focused on the development of quarterly PCE by state statistics. This paper outlines the methods and data sources used, along with preliminary statistics from this effort. We employ a variety of data sources, adjust them to align to BEA’s concepts and framework, and use them as indicators to interpolate and benchmark the quarterly estimates to both annual PCE by state and national quarterly PCE statistics. In addition to being timelier, these statistics, were they to be produced on regular basis, would complement BEA’s state quarterly gross domestic product and state quarterly personal income statistics to provide a more comprehensive and timely view of the state economies.