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.
Regional Patterns in Medical Technology Utilization
The U.S. health-care system is characterized by the rapid adoption and diffusion of medical technologies and high regional variation in health-care utilization and spending. I examine the correlations in the adoption and utilization rates of sixteen outpatient health-care technologies of… Read more
Does Medicare Part D Save Lives?
We examine the impact of Medicare Part D on mortality for the population over the age of 65. We identify the effects of the reform using variation in drug coverage across counties before the reform was implemented. Studying mortality rates immediately before and after the reform, we find that… Read more
Measuring Nursing Home Price Growth between 2000-2009
The proper measurement of inflation in health care is important for policymakers to understand the drivers of price growth. For this reason, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently released an alternate presentation of inflation for the health care sector that examines prices by… Read more
A Primer on the Measurement of Net Stocks, Depreciation, Capital Services, and Their Integration
This manual is intended to be a "primer" on the rudiments of the methodologies used to estimate capital stocks and the value of their services by statistical agencies. It explains the key parts of methodologies used to estimate wealth stock estimates through the use of numeric examples and… Read more
Identifying Heterogeneity in the Production Components of Globally Engaged Business Enterprises in the United States
This paper presents experimental tables created by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis comparing industry-specific shares of the components of total output of globally engaged firms located in the United States that are part of a multinational enterprise (U.S. parents and U.S. affiliates) with… Read more
Medical Care Expenditure Indexes for the US, 1980-2006
We construct historical medical care expenditure indexes (MCEs) for the US economy for the period 1980-2006, thus supplementing the MCEs provided in the BEA health account for the period 2001-2010 (Dunn et al, 2015). Comparing our MCEs to the official deflators used in the national accounts, our… Read more
New Estimates of Value of Land of the United States
Land is an important and valuable natural resource, serving both as a store of wealth and as an input in production. Previous attempts to measure the value of land of the United States have focused on indirect measures, inferring values based on the difference between the market value of real… Read more
Methods of Temporal Disaggregation for Estimating Output of the Insurance Industry
A variety of mathematical and statistical methods have been developed and applied by researchers to solve problems of temporal disaggregation, the process of estimating unobserved sub-annual series from observed annual values. Despite a vast body of work evaluating the ability of different… Read more
Estimating Regression-Based Medical Care Expenditure Indexes for Medicare Advantage Enrollees
I construct a disease-based medical expenditure index for Medicare Advantage (private plan) enrollees using data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey from 2001-2009. I create the indexes by modeling total health-care expenditure as a function of each respondent’s diagnoses. Total medical… Read more
Is Labor's Loss Capital's Gain? Gross versus Net Labor Shares
Labor share has been falling since the 1970s. I show that U.S. labor share has not fallen as much once items that do not add to capital, depreciation and production taxes, are netted out. Recent net labor share is within its historical range whereas gross share is at its lowest level. This… Read more