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.
The Role of Industry Classification in the Estimation of Research and Development Expenditures
This paper uses data from the National Science Foundation’s surveys on business research and development (R&D) expenditures that have been linked with data from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database to produce consistent NAICS-based R&D time-series data based on the main… Read more
Using Disability Adjusted Life Years to Value the Treatment of Thirty Chronic Conditions in the U.S. from 1987-2010
Health care spending in the U.S. grew two trillion dollars from 1987 to 2010, a 400% increase, but our understanding of the value of that increase is limited. In this paper we determine the net value of spending at the disease level by assigning a monetary value to changes in health outcomes and… Read more
Private Defined Benefit Pension Plans in the U.S. National Accounts: Accrual Measures for the 2013 Comprehensive Revision
With the comprehensive revision of the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts published in July 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis introduced new accrual-based measures of income generated by defined benefit (DB) pension plans. In addition to the improved measurement, BEA introduced a… Read more
Expenditure Weights in the Regional Price Parities
Regional Price Parities (RPPs) are spatial price indexes that measure price level differences across regions, such as states or metropolitan areas (MSAs). RPP expenditure weights, an important component in RPP estimation, are based on Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey data from the Bureau of… Read more
The Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA)
On December 5, 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released, for the first time, prototype estimates from the new Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA). In this satellite account, we used an input-output (I-O) framework… Read more
Integrated Industry‐Level Production Account for the United States: Intellectual Property Products and the 2007 NAICS
Ongoing structural change in the U.S. economy due, in part, to globalization, the spread of information and communications technology, and the Great Recession, has reinforced the need for an up‐to‐date decomposition of aggregate GDP to industry‐level sources of growth. This approach, typically… Read more
Offshoring, Sourcing Substitution Bias and the Measurement of US Import Prices, Real GDP and Productivity
The decade ending in 2007 was a period of rapid sourcing substitution for manufactured goods consumed in the US. Imports were substituted for local sourcing, and patterns of supply for imports changed to give a large role to new producers in emerging economies. The change in the price paid by… Read more
Introduction to Measuring Wealth and Financial Intermediation and their links to the Real Economy
This introductory chapter to the NBER/CRIW conference volume that is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press contains an overview of the papers that were presented at a meeting of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth in November 2010 and that are included in the conference… Read more
Health Insurance and the Demand for Medical Care: Instrumental Variable Estimates Using Health Insurer Claims Data
This paper takes a different approach to estimating demand for medical care that uses the negotiated prices between insurers and providers as an instrument. The instrument is viewed as a textbook “cost shifting” instrument that impacts plan offerings, but is unobserved by consumers. The paper… Read more
Defining Disease Episodes and the Effects on the Components of Expenditure Growth
To better understand productivity and inflation in the health sector, health economists have advocated tracking the cost of treatment by disease over time. However, there are several methods for measuring the cost of treatment, and little work has been done to understand how different approaches… Read more