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.
Measuring the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumer Spending Using Card Transaction Data
We evaluate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer spending using daily card transaction data. Overall, we find large effects of this pandemic on sectors such as accommodations and restaurants, which by the second week of March, show declines of around 80 percent and 70… Read more
Measuring the Small Business Economy
To better track the overall growth and relative contributions of small business in the U.S. economy, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is developing new economic statistics by business size. The paper begins with a description of existing economic statistics for small businesses, including… Read more
Energy Efficiency in General Equilibrium with Input-Output Linkages
Industrial activity periodically experiences breakthrough innovations in energy efficiency, but the estimated impacts of these innovations on aggregate energy use are highly varied. We develop a general equilibrium model to investigate whether this variation is determined by the structure of the… Read more
Toward Developing Estimates Of U.S. Imports Of Illegal Drugs
This paper explores potential ways to develop experimental estimates of the value of U.S. imports of illegal drugs. It builds on the initial exploration of this topic by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in Soloveichik (2019), which presents experimental estimates of U.S. domestic… Read more
Nowcasting of Advance Estimates of Personal Consumption of Services in the U.S. National Accounts: Individual vs Forecasting Combination Approach
This paper evaluates two individual nowcasting frameworks, the bridge equation and bridging with factors model, in concert with a set of forecast combination techniques for nowcasting the advance estimates of quarterly personal consumption expenditures (PCE) of services at the detailed component… Read more
Quantifying Productivity Growth in the Delivery of Important Episodes of Care Within the Medicare Program Using Insurance Claims and Administrative Data
We assess changes in multifactor productivity in delivering acute episodes of care (including services received after initial discharge from a hospital) for elderly Medicare beneficiaries over 2002-2014. For a majority of the eight episode types studied, productivity improved, exceeding an… Read more
Measuring Trade in Services by Mode of Supply
This paper reviews the efforts of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to measure international services categorized by mode of supply. BEA has adopted a survey form that uses an innovative approach to collect information on mode of supply by simply having companies report the percentage of its… Read more
Current-Account Asymmetries in U.S.–EU Statistics
The United States and the European Union are the foremost trading partners in the world, with total bilateral current-account transactions exceeding $1.8 trillion in 2017, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat). In… Read more
Investment Funds in the U.S. National Accounts
Investment funds, which include mutual funds, other regulated investment companies, and real estate investment trusts, play an increasingly important role in the U.S. economy, with financial assets of about $23 trillion in 2017. Currently, in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs… Read more
Including Illegal Activity in the U.S. National Economic Accounts
The internationally agreed guidelines for national economic accounts, System of National Accounts 2008 (hereafter referred to as SNA 2008) (United Nations Statistics Division 2008), explicitly recommend that illegal market activity should be included in the measured economy. This recommendation… Read more