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.
Drug Innovations and Welfare Measures Computed from Market Demand: The Case of Anti-Cholesterol Drugs
The pharmaceutical industry is characterized as having substantial investment in R&D and a large number of new product introductions, which poses special problems for price measurement caused by the quality of drug products changing over time. This paper applies recent demand estimation… Read more
Medical Care Price Indexes for Patients with Employer-Provided Insurance: Nationally-Representative Estimates from MarketScan Data
OBJECTIVE: Commonly observed shifts in the utilization of medical care services to treat diseases may pose problems for official price indexes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that do not account for service shifts. We examine how these shifts may lead to different price estimates than… Read more
A Reconciliation of Health Care Expenditures in the National Health Expenditure Accounts and in Gross Domestic Product
Measuring the Nation's Economy: An Industry Perspective | A Primer on BEA's Industry Accounts (2010)
This paper introduces new users to the basics of the U.S. industry economic accounts. It provides an overview of each of BEA’s industry accounts and how they may be used to answer a variety of questions about the U.S. economy, industry activity, and the flow of goods and services throughout the… Read more
Health Care Expenditures in the National Health Expenditures Accounts and in Gross Domestic Product: A Reconciliation
This paper provides a most detailed reconciliation to date 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 (CMS), and the estimates of health expenditures that are part of… Read more
The Value of Coverage in the Medicare Advantage Insurance Market
This paper examines the impact of coverage on demand for health insurance in the Medicare Advantage (MA) insurance market. Estimating the effects of coverage on demand poses a challenge for researchers who must must consider both the hundreds of benefits that affect out-of-pocket costs (OOPC) to… Read more
Comparing the Consistency of Price Parities for Regions of the U.S. in an Economic Approach Framework
International Supply Chains and the Volatility of Trade
The world trade collapsed in the most recent recession. Some analysts have suggested the increasing offshoring of the supply chain, or vertical specialization (VS) trade, can explain the apparent increase in volatility of trade over the business cycle. This paper develops a model of VS trade to… Read more
Implications of Consumer Heterogeneity on Price Measures for Technology Goods
Using a new dataset on household purchases of personal computers (PCs), we document positive correlations between buyers' incomes and the prices they pay for seemingly identical PCs. These results suggest that firms may be successful at separating the market and charging different prices to… Read more
The Impact of Competition on Technology Adoption: An Apples-to-PCs Analysis
We study the effect of market structure on a firm's decision to adopt a new technology in the personal computer industry. This industry is unusual because there exists two horizontally segmented retail markets with different degrees of competition: the IBM compatible (or "PC") platform and the… Read more