Papers

Open source software (OSS) is software that anyone can study, inspect, modify, and distribute freely under very limited restrictions, generally attribution. While OSS is vital to virtually all aspects of modern society, there is no standard methodology to satisfactorily measure the scope and… Read more

Government enterprises are government agencies that operate like market producers by covering a substantial proportion of their operating costs by selling goods and services to the public. The current surplus of state and local government enterprises in the National Income and Product Accounts (… Read more

Given the attention to intangible capital in studying industry dynamics and aggregate investment trends in the last couple of decades, this paper provides a descriptive analysis of Intellectual Property Products (IPP) as measured in the National Accounts (NIPAs) by the Bureau of Economic… Read more

In recent years, a growing interest in the topic of income inequality has fueled demand for information on the way in which the nation’s prosperity and growth are shared across households, as a complement to published data on total income and output. This paper details the methodology and… Read more

The recent debates on infrastructure spending have led to renewed interest in the measurement of infrastructure and its effects on growth and wellbeing. This paper updates estimates of one important type of infrastructure capital—highways and streets. We compare BEA’s capital measures with more… Read more

Most economic theories of value-chain governance examine one transaction at a time and focus on transaction type as the key determinant of governance. We instead consider several transactions jointly, suggesting that lead firms experience economies of scope in developing relational contracts… Read more

BEA employs automated data editing and imputation systems to process a subset of its multinational enterprise (MNE) surveys. Until recently, all of the auto-editing systems used at BEA were built around the Banff system for data editing and imputation produced by Statistics Canada, which runs in… Read more

Theoretical inflation diverges from official price statistics when products are unavailable due to stay-in-place behavior or due to stockouts caused by supply chain disruptions. In this paper, the word “theoretical inflation” designates inflation that is consistent with price measurement theory… Read more

The arrival of new merchants poses problems for measuring inflation, and many think the resulting biases in the official statistics are nontrivial. The BLS methods treat identical commodities sold by different merchants as distinct, different goods but to the extent the goods are close… Read more

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) conducted a feasibility study to evaluate whether it is possible to produce a quarterly distribution of personal income and construct inequality metrics that are valid, informative, and transparent. The primary obstacles to producing such estimates are… Read more