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.
Accrual Measures of Pension-Related Compensation and Wealth of State and Local Government Workers
This paper develops a method to convert the normal costs and actuarial liabilities published by state and local government retirement systems for their defined benefit pension plans to measures consistent with national income accounting principles. It also standardizes the measures using a… Read more
Measuring the Price of Research and Development Output
This paper develops a framework for constructing an R&D output price index. Based on a model of the innovator, we show that the price of innovation is equal to the expected discounted stream of profits attributable to the adoption of the innovation. Using this relationship, we construct an R… Read more
Integrated GDP-Productivity Accounts
Estimates of State and Metropolitan Price Levels for Consumption Goods and Services in the United States, 2005
Price indexes are commonly used in time-to-time economic series to adjust for changes in price levels across years. This paper estimates price parities within the U.S., defined as an adjustment for differences in price levels across geographic areas at one point in time. The term parity is more… Read more
Do Intangible Assets Explain High U.S. Foreign Direct Investment Returns?
U.S. investors abroad receive a higher return on their assets than their counterparts that invest in the United States. I examine the degree to which excluding intangible assets from the measurement of foreign direct investment can account for this gap. Using a growth accounting framework, I… Read more
Seasonality and Prepackaged Software Price Indexes
In this paper, we construct a seasonally-adjusted price index for prepackaged software using detailed and comprehensive scanner data from the NPD Group. We document a large sales surge over the winter-holiday and claim that this seasonality is being driven by consumer heterogeneity. We introduce… Read more
The Importance of Pricing the Bundle of Treatments
In this paper, we explore the importance of shifts in treatments for explaining increases in the cost of health care services. Using a large database of health insurance claims for sample patients, we find that there have been shifts in treatment intensity that have an important effect on costs… Read more
State-Level Wage AGI Gap for Tax Years 2000-2002
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), under contract with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Office of Research, undertook an update of BEA’s state-level wage reconciliation for 2000 between BEA wages and salaries and IRS wages and salaries in Adjusted Gross Income. The initial reconciliation… Read more
Metropolitan Area Disposable Personal Income: Methodology and Results for 2001-2004
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes annual estimates of state disposable personal income, the difference between state personal income and state personal current taxes. BEA also publishes annual estimates of personal income for sub-state areas, but BEA does not publish corresponding… Read more