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 Contribution of Reallocation to U.S. GDP Growth: Measurement Using Tiered Aggregation
Resources moving from less productive to more productive sectors can increase aggregate output without any underlying change in production technology, yet the impact of these reallocations is challenging to measure because it involves measuring unobserved counterfactual production where… Read more
Tracking Cultivated Assets in Measures of Capital
Americans invested $72 billion in cultivated assets in 2019. By category, investment was: $7 billion in long-lived food animals, $2 billion in horses, $10 billion in farm plants, and $53 billion in landscaping plants. System of National Accounts 2008, the internationally agreed… Read more
Tracking Marijuana in the National Accounts
The internationally agreed guidelines for national economic accounts, System of National Accounts 2008 (United Nations Statistics Division 2008), explicitly recommend that illegal market activity should be tracked together with legal market activity. This recommendation is not currently… Read more
Estimating Regional Price Parities Using New Data on Medical Goods and Services
I report on a project to improve estimates of Regional Price Parities (RPPs) by making use of a large commercial dataset on health care prices, the Health Marketscan dataset. Using the new data, I obtain estimates of regional price levels for health related goods and services that are stable… Read more
Work Context and Industrial Composition Determine the Epidemiological Responses in a Multi-Group SIR Model
Key economic indicators, such as GDP and unemployment rates, provide a useful backdrop for assessing the state of the economy. However, more nuanced statistics can be of use during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we extend the domain of relevance for economic statistics by developing a… Read more
Assessing Residual Seasonality in the U.S. National Income and Product Account Aggregates
There is an ongoing debate on whether residual seasonality is present in the estimates of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in U.S. national accounts and whether it explains the slower quarter-one GDP growth rate in the recent years. This paper aims to bring clarity to this topic by 1)… Read more
Alternative Price and Volume Measures for Commercial Bank and Fund Management Services
In the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts, commercial bank and fund management services grew modestly or declined in volume terms after 2008, despite substantial increases in the levels of assets and liabilities managed by these businesses. These estimates of limited growth result partly… Read more
Preliminary Estimates of the U.S. Space Economy, 2012–2018
Consumer Prices During A Stay-in-Place Policy: Theoretical Inflation for Unavailable Products
Major product categories like full service restaurant meals, live entertainment, and nonessential personal services are unavailable during a stay-in-place policy. As a result, their inflation rates cannot be measured directly. The standard methodology used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS… Read more
Measuring Inequality in the National Accounts
This paper provides context for the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) prototype estimates of the distribution of income. It describes measurement questions, such as what concept of income should be used, and a summary of the results for the 2007–2018 period. The paper also presents a… Read more