Papers

Official poverty statistics are used in the United States to evaluate economic well-being at the national level, and to distribute federal anti-poverty funds across states and urban areas. However, these statistics are based on thresholds or poverty lines that do not take into account geographic… Read more

The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) series published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) includes estimates of rent expenditures and owner-occupied housing expenditures for the benchmark year 2001. The main data sources are the Residential Financial Survey (RFS), carried out in… Read more

This paper presents exploratory estimates of U.S. international supply of services by mode. There is interest in international services by mode partly because government trade negotiators structure agreements around these modes. The estimates are based on statistics on trade in services… Read more

National health expenditures and health care prices are routinely measured according to type of service, such as hospital care, physician care, or prescription drugs. The official National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA) maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS),… Read more

U.S. time use patterns have changed over the last century in ways that appear inconsistent. Leisure has increased with income but has increased most for the poorest. I develop a unified model that treats leisure as an economic activity. Leisure services are produced using capital, like… Read more

Objective. To provide guidance on selecting the most appropriate price index for adjusting health expenditures or costs for inflation.

Data Sources. Major price index series produced by federal statistical agencies.

Study Design. We compare the key characteristics of each index… Read more

We develop a forward-looking profit model to estimate the depreciation rates of business R&D capital. By using data from Compustat, BEA, and NSF between 1987 and 2008, and the newly developed model, we estimate both constant and time-varying industry-specific R&D depreciation rates. The… Read more

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes gross domestic product (GDP) statistics for the nation, states, and metropolitan areas. GDP by county statistics would provide a much richer picture of the geographic distribution of the nation’s economic activity to assist analysts in the… Read more

The System of National Accounts (SNA) classifies each resident institutional unit to one of five institutional sectors. The corporations sector in the SNA includes a concept of quasi-corporations, which are unincorporated enterprises that have no legal status separate from… Read more

‘Free’ consumer entertainment and information from the Internet, largely supported by advertising revenues, has had a major impact on consumer behavior. Some economists believe that gross domestic product (GDP) growth is badly underestimated because GDP excludes online entertainment (… Read more