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.
"The Complexity of Billing and Paying for Physician Care
The administrative costs of providing health insurance in the US are very high, but their determinants are poorly understood. We advance the nascent literature in this field by developing new measures of billing complexity for physician care across insurers and over time, and by estimating them… Read more
Assessing the Automated Imputation of Missing and Erroneous Survey Data: A Simulation-Based Approach
Defining and Measuring the Digital Economy
This paper, made possible by support from the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), describes the work of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to develop estimates towards the construction of a new digital economy satellite account. These… Read more
Valuing Owner-Occupied Housing: an empirical exercise using the American Community Survey (ACS) Housing files
In Aten (2017) the rental equivalence method was applied to the owner-occupied housing (OOH) stock in the United States to impute the flow of housing services for the period 2000-2015. The rents were based upon the American Community Survey and were broken into seven types of structure, vintage… Read more
Experimental Estimates of Wages and Gross Output by Business Size and Industry, 2002-2012
This paper presents experimental estimates of wages and gross output by business size and industry sector for 2002-2012. We find small businesses, those employing less than 100 workers, experienced relatively slower growth between 2002 and 2012 for both wages and gross output compared to larger… Read more
Transatlantic Trade in Services: Investigating Bilateral Asymmetries in EU-U.S. Trade Statistics
The European Union (EU) and the United States are the biggest economic partners in international trade in services in the world, with total bilateral trade in 2015 exceeding EUR 400 billion according to the data reported by Eurostat. The United States accounted for close to 30 percent of total… Read more
Measuring the "Free" Digital Economy within the GDP and Productivity Accounts
We develop an experimental methodology that values "free" digital content through the lens of a production account and is consistent with the framework of the national accounts. We build upon the work in Nakamura, et al. (2016) by combining marketing- and advertising-supported content and find… Read more
An Updated Analysis of the Roles of Cost per Case and Treated Prevalence in Health Spending Growth
This report presents data, methods, and findings from a study of the roles of treated disease prevalence (treated prevalence) and cost per person treated (cost per case) on the rate of increase in real per capita health spending by the civilian non-institutional population from 1996 through 2014… Read more
Imputing Rents to Owner-Occupied Housing by Directly Modelling Their Distribution
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) makes the official estimates of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs). Two key aggregates in these accounts are the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) and the personal income of households. The rental value of owner-occupied housing… Read more
Effect of Mode Choice and Respondent Characteristics on Data Quality: Profiling Respondents to BEA's Annual Survey of Foreign Direct Investment in the United States
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) conducts the Annual Survey of Foreign Direct Investment in the United States, a mandatory enterprise level survey that collects information on the finances and operations of foreign-owned U.S. businesses. Respondents submit data by mail, facsimile, and… Read more