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.
Consumer Prices During A Stay-in-Place Policy: Theoretical Inflation for Unavailable Products
Major product categories like full service restaurant meals, live entertainment, and nonessential personal services are unavailable during a stay-in-place policy. As a result, their inflation rates cannot be measured directly. The standard methodology used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS… Read more
Measuring Inequality in the National Accounts
This paper provides context for the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) prototype estimates of the distribution of income. It describes measurement questions, such as what concept of income should be used, and a summary of the results for the 2007–2018 period. The paper also presents a… Read more
Spending by Condition for the Long-Term Care Population Using Medicaid Claims
Health care spending for the nursing home sector has been an understudied topic despite institutionalized long-term care patients often facing higher mortality rates, having numerous and serious comorbidities, and accounting for over $194 billion dollars in personal health care expenditure just… Read more
The Geography of Consumption and Local Economic Shocks: The Case of the Great Recession
Geographic analysis of consumption is often constrained by geographic borders such as counties, but economic agents often cross borders to consume. Using unique card transaction data, we estimate across-county spending flows between firms and consumers for every county in the United States and… Read more
Metropolitan Statistical Area Location Choice by Foreign Direct Investors in the United States
The importance of new foreign direct investment as a vehicle for the formation of productive capital has stimulated interest in understanding why multinational enterprises (MNEs) choose particular locations for their investments. Using data from greenfield investments reported on the BEA Survey… Read more
The Owner-Premium Adjustment in Housing Imputations
This paper describes and alternative to the rental equivalence and the user cost approaches for imputing consumer expenditures on owner-occupied housing services. The alternative uses the estimated value of the dwelling relative to the median value of similar homes as an adjustment to the rental… Read more
A Reconciliation of Health Care Expenditures in the National Health Expenditures Accounts and in Gross Domestic Product
This paper provides a detailed reconciliation 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, and the estimates of health expenditures that are part of gross domestic… Read more
Measuring the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumer Spending Using Card Transaction Data
We evaluate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer spending using daily card transaction data. Overall, we find large effects of this pandemic on sectors such as accommodations and restaurants, which by the second week of March, show declines of around 80 percent and 70… Read more
Measuring the Small Business Economy
To better track the overall growth and relative contributions of small business in the U.S. economy, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is developing new economic statistics by business size. The paper begins with a description of existing economic statistics for small businesses, including… Read more
Energy Efficiency in General Equilibrium with Input-Output Linkages
Industrial activity periodically experiences breakthrough innovations in energy efficiency, but the estimated impacts of these innovations on aggregate energy use are highly varied. We develop a general equilibrium model to investigate whether this variation is determined by the structure of the… Read more