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.
Metropolitan Statistical Area Location Choice by Foreign Direct Investors in the United States
The importance of new foreign direct investment as a vehicle for the formation of productive capital has stimulated interest in understanding why multinational enterprises (MNEs) choose particular locations for their investments. Using data from greenfield investments reported on the BEA Survey… Read more
The Owner-Premium Adjustment in Housing Imputations
This paper describes and alternative to the rental equivalence and the user cost approaches for imputing consumer expenditures on owner-occupied housing services. The alternative uses the estimated value of the dwelling relative to the median value of similar homes as an adjustment to the rental… Read more
A Reconciliation of Health Care Expenditures in the National Health Expenditures Accounts and in Gross Domestic Product
This paper provides a detailed reconciliation of the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA), the official estimates of health care spending in the United States from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the estimates of health expenditures that are part of gross domestic… Read more
Productivity Growth in Treating a Major Chronic Health Condition
Recent assessments of acute episodes of care point to productivity growth stemming from improvements in patient outcomes. This study assesses productivity growth in the treatment of a major chronic condition, specifically, type 2 diabetes. Analyzing traditional Medicare beneficiaries with new… Read more
Measuring the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumer Spending Using Card Transaction Data
We evaluate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer spending using daily card transaction data. Overall, we find large effects of this pandemic on sectors such as accommodations and restaurants, which by the second week of March, show declines of around 80 percent and 70… Read more
Measuring the Small Business Economy
To better track the overall growth and relative contributions of small business in the U.S. economy, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is developing new economic statistics by business size. The paper begins with a description of existing economic statistics for small businesses, including… Read more
Energy Efficiency in General Equilibrium with Input-Output Linkages
Industrial activity periodically experiences breakthrough innovations in energy efficiency, but the estimated impacts of these innovations on aggregate energy use are highly varied. We develop a general equilibrium model to investigate whether this variation is determined by the structure of the… Read more
Toward Developing Estimates Of U.S. Imports Of Illegal Drugs
This paper explores potential ways to develop experimental estimates of the value of U.S. imports of illegal drugs. It builds on the initial exploration of this topic by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in Soloveichik (2019), which presents experimental estimates of U.S. domestic… Read more
Nowcasting of Advance Estimates of Personal Consumption of Services in the U.S. National Accounts: Individual vs Forecasting Combination Approach
This paper evaluates two individual nowcasting frameworks, the bridge equation and bridging with factors model, in concert with a set of forecast combination techniques for nowcasting the advance estimates of quarterly personal consumption expenditures (PCE) of services at the detailed component… Read more
Quantifying Productivity Growth in the Delivery of Important Episodes of Care Within the Medicare Program Using Insurance Claims and Administrative Data
We assess changes in multifactor productivity in delivering acute episodes of care (including services received after initial discharge from a hospital) for elderly Medicare beneficiaries over 2002-2014. For a majority of the eight episode types studied, productivity improved, exceeding an… Read more