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.
Proof of Concept for a U.S. Air Emissions Physical Flows Account
Measuring the physical flows of resources and waste between the economy and environment is a central component of environmental-economic accounting as outlined in the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), the United Nations standard for environmental accounting.
This paper… Read more
Developing a National Measure of the Economic Contributions of the Bioeconomy
In recent years, interest in biotechnology, biomanufacturing, and the bioeconomy has grown steadily. Researchers in the United States and other countries have sought to measure the bioeconomy and have developed a variety of definitions and approaches for doing so. Executive Order 14081, issued… Read more
The Geography of Consumption and Local Economic Shocks: The Case of the Great Recession
We estimate across-county spending flows between firms and consumers for every county in the United States, providing a new consumption link that has not been studied previously. We highlight the importance of this link by estimating the effect of changes in local housing wealth on consumption… Read more
Valuing the U.S. Data Economy Using Machine Learning and Online Job Postings
With the recent proliferation of data collection and uses in the digital economy, the understanding and statistical treatment of data stocks and flows is of interest among compilers and users of national economic accounts. In this paper, we measure the value of own-account data stocks and flows… Read more
First Quarter Wages and Employment by Industry for Small Businesses Using Establishment-Based Size Classes, 2012–2021
Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, disaggregated by number of employees in an establishment, are used to estimate first quarter wages and employment by industry for small, medium, and large businesses between 2012 and 2021. This is the first set of… Read more
Multinational Firms in the U.S. Economy: Insights from Newly Integrated Microdata
This paper describes the construction of two confidential crosswalk files enabling a comprehensive identification of multinational firms in the U.S. economy. The effort combines firm-level surveys on direct investment conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the U.S. Census… Read more
Natural Resource Exploration as Intangible Investment
Natural resources are everywhere, and reported wellbeing is highly correlated with the quantity and quality of natural resource services like weather and biodiversity (Levinson 2012) (MacKerron and Mourato 2013) (Methorst et al. 2021). Yet, natural resources are currently classified as non-… Read more
Measuring the Cost of Open Source Software Innovation on GitHub
Open source software (OSS) is software that anyone can study, inspect, modify, and distribute freely under very limited restrictions, generally attribution. While OSS is vital to virtually all aspects of modern society, there is no standard methodology to satisfactorily measure the scope and… Read more
Better Reflecting Transitions in Market Production by Government Functions Over Time: Updating the Classification of State and Local Government Enterprises in the National Income and Product Accounts
Government enterprises are government agencies that operate like market producers by covering a substantial proportion of their operating costs by selling goods and services to the public. The current surplus of state and local government enterprises in the National Income and Product Accounts (… Read more
Understanding the uneven growth of Intellectual Property Products investment in the U.S.
Given the attention to intangible capital in studying industry dynamics and aggregate investment trends in the last couple of decades, this paper provides a descriptive analysis of Intellectual Property Products (IPP) as measured in the National Accounts (NIPAs) by the Bureau of Economic… Read more