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.
Volunteer Output and the National Accounts: An Empirical Analysis
Volunteer activities attempt to promote a sense of community unity and ownership. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Department of Labor, approximately 59 million people participated in volunteer activities in the year beginning September 2001. Although utility is derived from… Read more
Current Consumption and Future Income Growth: Synthetic Panel Evidence
Using group means computed from twenty years of high quality survey data, I show a strong and robust relation between households' consumption growth and subsequent realizations of their income growth, including realizations as distant as six years later. The relation appears in multiple… Read more
International Fragmentation of Production and the Intrafirm Trade of U.S. Multinational Companies
An aspect of globalization that has attracted increased attention in recent years is trade in intermediate inputs associated with the fragmentation of production across national borders. This trade takes the form of intrafirm transactions when production stages in different countries are… Read more
The Reliability of the State Personal Income Estimates
A new study by BEA finds that the quarterly estimates of state personal income were reliable indicators in the period 1991-2001. That is, they were generally successful in indicating whether a state’s economy was expanding or contracting, whether a state’s economy was accelerating or… Read more
NIPA Corporate Profits and Reported Earnings: A Comparison and Measurement Issues
The users of the national income and product accounts (NIPAs) often compare the growth rates of NIPA profit measures with those of other publicly available measures of reported earnings, such as Standard & Poor's 500 earnings. Differences between the NIPA profit measures and the other… Read more
Trade in Goods Within Multinational Companies: Survey-Based Data and Findings for the United States of America
This paper discusses the data on U.S. intrafirm trade in goods collected in BEA's surveys of the operations of U.S. multinational firms and foreign-owned U.S. affiliates. It also examines patterns that emerge from the data, with a particular focus on the intrafirm-trade shares of U.S. exports… Read more
New Quality Adjusted Price Indexes for Nonresidential Structures
Accurate, quality adjusted prices for nonresidential structures are necessary for a good understanding of the functioning of the economy. In order to improve its estimates of nonresidential structures’ prices, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has developed new quality adjusted price indexes… Read more
Survey Data Collection Over the Internet at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
This paper summarizes the progress the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has made in converting its paper-based survey data collection system to an electronic reporting system that collects data via the Internet. The paper describes the pilot program that resulted in BEA's Automated Survey… Read more
Working with Chain-type Aggregates: A Few Tricks
Globalization and Multinational Companies: What Are the Questions, and How Well Are We Doing in Answering Them?
This paper looks at the U.S. experience and uses it as a benchmark for identifying the key questions that are being asked about the role and influence of MNC's and the types of statistics that are required to answer those questions. The paper goes on to assess whether the U.S. statistics that… Read more