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.
Globalization, Offshoring, and Multinational Companies: What Are the Questions, and How Well Are We Doing in Answering Them?
This paper identifies key questions that are being asked about globalization and MNC’s and then reviews the types of statistics that are required to answer those questions. The paper goes on to assess whether the statistics collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis are adequate to address… Read more
Accounting for Nonmarket Production: A Prototype Satellite Account Using the American Time Use Survey
Evaluating and Adjusting for Chain Drift in National Economic Accounts
Chain drift is the difference between the rate of change calculated by chaining an index over a multi period interval and that obtained using endpoints only. More generally, different linking intervals yield different estimates. In this paper, procedures are suggested for evaluating the severity… Read more
Chain Drift in Leading Superlative Indexes
Chain drift is the difference between the rate of change calculated by chaining an index over a multi period interval and that obtained using endpoints only. This intransitivity can produce ambiguity in estimated growth rates if the “correct” linking interval is not known. The present paper… Read more
Report on Interarea Price Levels
This report describes the estimation of differences in price levels across 38 geographic areas in the United States. It is based on prices collected for the 2003 Consumer Price Index (CPI) comprising eight expenditure components: Apparel, Education, Food and Beverages, Housing, Medical Goods and… Read more
Importance of Data Sharing to BEA
Moore's Law, Competition and Intel's Productivity in the Mid-1990s
Why Are Semiconductor Price Indexes Falling So Fast?: Industry Estimates and Implications for Productivity Measurement
By any measure, price deflators for semiconductors fell at a staggering pace over much of the last decade, pulled down by steep declines in the deflator for the microprocessor (MPU) segment. These rapid price declines are typically attributed to technological innovations that lower constant-… Read more
Differences in Hedonic and Matched-Model Price Indexes: Do the Weights Matter?
This note uses scanner data for over 60 segments of consumer information technology (IT) and electronic goods to construct matched-model indexes. Virtually all of the segment-level indexes constructed with these data show price declines that reflect quality increases—a typical exception is… Read more
Alternative Measures of U.S. Economic Activity in Business Cycles and Business Cycle Dating
The paper looks at the 10 recessions since World War II, and compares them to both monthly and quarterly indicators of general economic activity. It finds that four monthly measures emphasized by the NBER’s dating committee do not fully agree with the official peak and trough months, but that—as… Read more