Papers

U.S. health care expenditures as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) reached 17.9 percent in 2011. That share will continue to grow significantly, according to recent studies by the Congressional Budget Office. This trend has raised questions about the sources of this growth, whether the… Read more

Relative price levels for all the U.S. states and metropolitan regions were estimated in Aten, Figueroa and Martin (2011, 2012, forthcoming 2013) 1 . We use the term RPPs and relative price levels interchangeably since no currency conversion is necessary within the U.S. This is similar to the… Read more

This paper presents a preliminary methodology and estimates for an experimental set of data on nominal personal consumption expenditures (PCE) for eight categories of goods, seven categories of services, and net expenditures of nonprofit institutions serving households (NPISHs) for fifty states… Read more

This paper suggests a new semi-parametric multivariate approach to seasonal adjustment. The primary innovation is to use a large dimensional factor model of cross section dependence to estimate the trend component in the seasonal decomposition of each time series. Because the trend component is… Read more

Macro estimates of household income and expenditures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis measure aggregate and per capita averages, but provide no information on the distribution of income, which is important in the measurement of economic well-being. Micro estimates of household income and… Read more

We construct a disease-based price index for Medicare beneficiaries using data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey from 2001-2005. We create the index by modeling total health-care expenditure as a function of the diagnoses of 27 illnesses. The coefficients from the regression are used… Read more

We study the degree to which greater physician concentration leads to higher service prices charged by physicians in the commercially insured medical-care market. Using a database of physicians throughout the entire United States, we construct physician-firm concentration measures based on… Read more

This paper examines the productivity of home production. I calculate annual home production output and productivity for the United States from 1929 to 2010. Both labor and total factor productivity increased rapidly after World War Two, but slowed after the late 1970s. The household sector is… Read more

This paper provides intangible trade data for an important U.S. export industry during a period when official data are very thin. It examines what modes firms use to export intangible assets. It uses a novel data source that provides very detailed information on export modal choice and market… Read more