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.
Differences in Hedonic and Matched-Model Price Indexes: Do the Weights Matter?
This note uses scanner data for over 60 segments of consumer information technology (IT) and electronic goods to construct matched-model indexes. Virtually all of the segment-level indexes constructed with these data show price declines that reflect quality increases—a typical exception is… Read more
Moore's Law, Competition and Intel's Productivity in the Mid-1990s
Alternative Measures of U.S. Economic Activity in Business Cycles and Business Cycle Dating
The paper looks at the 10 recessions since World War II, and compares them to both monthly and quarterly indicators of general economic activity. It finds that four monthly measures emphasized by the NBER’s dating committee do not fully agree with the official peak and trough months, but that—as… Read more
Further Integrating BEA's Economic Accounts: Introducing Annual Input-Output Estimates into the Gross State Product by Industry Accounts
The December 2004 release of the GSP estimates takes BEA’s integration efforts one-step further, an important long-term goal in BEA’s Strategic Plan. Specifically, due to the concurrent release and integration of the annual IO accounts and the GDP-by-industry accounts and the resulting… Read more
U.S. Industry Classification Procedures for Direct Investment
Indirect Investment: FCS, USM, or 50% Ownership
Another Look At Nonresidential Building Prices
In the early 1990's, former BEA Chief Statistician Frank de Leeuw explored the possibility of using project data from F.W. Dodge to estimate hedonic price indexes for nonresidential buildings. He rejected the idea citing the lack of “quality” characteristics in the data and that the results were… Read more
The Effects of the Quality Adjustment Method on Price Indices for Digital Cameras
In this paper, the author tests different hedonic and conventional quality adjustment methods in a uniform, but somewhat unconventional, descriptive framework. The main aim is to address questions on hedonic quality adjustment methods and their robustness in index compilation. The author does… Read more
International Trade and Economic Growth: A Possible Methodology for Estimating Cross-Border R&D Spillovers
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has initiated a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project to produce an official BEA/NSF R&D Satellite Account (R&DSA). This paper presents a possible trade-based methodology for estimating cross-border R&D spillovers, which reflects an… Read more