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.
Geographic Variation in Commercial Medical-Care Expenditures: A Framework for Decomposing Price and Utilization
This study introduces a new framework for measuring and analyzing medical-care expenditures. The framework focuses on expenditures at the disease level that are decomposed between price and utilization. We find that both price and utilization differences are important contributors to expenditure… Read more
Human Capital Accounting in the United States: Context, Measurement, and Application
This study updates Christian's (2010) human capital account for the United States to the year 2009, refining the underlying data and putting the account into international context by reviewing applications in the rest of the world. It also measures the sensitivity of human capital measures to… Read more
Estimating the Local Economic Impacts of University Activity Using a Bill of Goods Approach
Economic impact analyses for universities often produce impacts so large that they are viewed with suspicion. Using data collected from universities on actual expenditures as well as the local share of these expenditures to calibrate and regionalize custom economic impact multipliers will… Read more
Notes on Estimating the Multi-Year Regional Price Parities by 16 Expenditure Categories: 2005-2009
Tables (XLS)
Competition among Spatially Differentiated Firms: An Estimator with an Application to Cement
We develop an estimator for models of competition among spatially differentiated firms. In contrast to existing methods (e.g., Houde (2009)), the estimator has flexible data requirements and is implementable with data that are observed at any level of aggregation. Further, the estimator is the… Read more
Input-Output Models for Impact Analysis: Suggestions for Practitioners Using RIMS II Multipliers
Input-output models, when applied correctly, can be powerful tools for estimating the economy-wide effects of an initial change in economic activity. To effectively use these models, analysts must collect detailed information about the project or program under study. Analysts also need to be… Read more
Sectoral Balance Sheets for Nonfinancial Assets
The integrated macroeconomic accounts (IMA), produced jointly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), present a sequence of accounts that relate production, income and saving, capital formation, financial transactions, and asset revaluations to changes in… Read more
Is GDP or GDI a better measure of output? A statistical approach.
Gross domestic product (GDP) and gross domestic income (GDI) are in theory estimates of the same concept, namely economic production over a defined span of time and space. Yet the two measures are compiled using different source data, and the two measures often give different indications of the… Read more
Alternative Price Indexes for Medical Care: Evidence from the MEPS Survey
Spending on medical care is a large and growing component of GDP. There are well-known measurement problems that are estimated to overstate inflation and understate real growth for this sector by as much as 1-1/ 2 percentage points per year. Because of its size, this would translate into an… Read more