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.
Terms of Trade Effects: Theory and Methods of Measurement
Foreign trade enables a nation to consume a different mix of goods and services than it produces, so to measure real gross domestic income (GDI) for an open economy, we must deflate by an index of the prices of the things that this income is used to buy, not the price index for GDP. The… Read more
Metropolitan Area Disposable Personal Income – Methodology and Results for 2001-2007
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes annual statistics of state disposable personal income, the difference between state personal income and state personal current taxes. BEA also publishes annual statistics of personal income for sub-state areas, but BEA does not publish… Read more
Declines in the Volatility of the US Economy; A Detailed Look
This paper uses GDP-by-state and industry data, and looks at the decline in volatility of the U.S. economy that occurred in about 1984. It finds that this decline primarily results from declines in covariances between industries, or between states, rather than declines in variances of the… Read more
Accrual Measures of Pension-Related Compensation and Wealth of State and Local Government Workers
This paper develops a method to convert the normal costs and actuarial liabilities published by state and local government retirement systems for their defined benefit pension plans to measures consistent with national income accounting principles. It also standardizes the measures using a… Read more
Measuring the Price of Research and Development Output
This paper develops a framework for constructing an R&D output price index. Based on a model of the innovator, we show that the price of innovation is equal to the expected discounted stream of profits attributable to the adoption of the innovation. Using this relationship, we construct an R… Read more
Integrated GDP-Productivity Accounts
Estimates of State and Metropolitan Price Levels for Consumption Goods and Services in the United States, 2005
Price indexes are commonly used in time-to-time economic series to adjust for changes in price levels across years. This paper estimates price parities within the U.S., defined as an adjustment for differences in price levels across geographic areas at one point in time. The term parity is more… Read more
Do Intangible Assets Explain High U.S. Foreign Direct Investment Returns?
U.S. investors abroad receive a higher return on their assets than their counterparts that invest in the United States. I examine the degree to which excluding intangible assets from the measurement of foreign direct investment can account for this gap. Using a growth accounting framework, I… Read more
Seasonality and Prepackaged Software Price Indexes
In this paper, we construct a seasonally-adjusted price index for prepackaged software using detailed and comprehensive scanner data from the NPD Group. We document a large sales surge over the winter-holiday and claim that this seasonality is being driven by consumer heterogeneity. We introduce… Read more