Papers

The utilization of health care services has undergone several important shifts in recent years that have implications for the cost of medical care. We empirically document the presence of these shifts for a broad list of medical conditions and assess the implications for price indexes. Following… Read more

As the core nationally representative health expenditure survey in the United States, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is increasingly being used by statistical agencies to track expenditures by disease. However, while MEPS provides a wealth of data, its small sample size precludes… Read more

The U.S., along with many other countries, plans to adjust official economic statistics in coming years to recognize R&D and several other intangibles as capital assets. We present here experimental estimates of the impact of capitalized intangibles on industry output and industry value… Read more

Trade costs have fallen surprisingly little given the large increase in international trade in the last 50 years. This paper examines whether trade costs are properly measured. I show theoretically that trade weighted measures will underestimate the changes in trade costs when there are fixed… Read more

This paper presents measures of the human capital stock and of investment in human capital for the United States between 1994 and 2006. When both market and non-market production are included, the stock of human capital was equal to about three quarters of a quadrillion dollars in 2006, of which… Read more

A parsimonious theoretical model of second degree price discrimination suggests that the business cycle will affect the degree to which firms are able to price discriminate between different consumer types. We analyze price dispersion in the airline industry to assess how price discrimination… Read more

Manufacturing and vertical specialization (VS) trade, trade in goods that incorporate imported inputs, has grown rapidly since the 1960s. I argue that declining trade costs are an important explanation for these facts. I present a three stage vertical specialization trade model, with raw… Read more

The United States possesses some of the most highly developed sets of gross domestic product (GDP) accounts in the world. These accounts—which are collectively know as the national income product and wealth accounts or national accounts—have been regularly updated over the years and have well… Read more

Supplemental Materials:

• Tables (XLS)