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.
Banff or Simputation? Assessing Alternative Approaches to the Imputation of Missing and Erroneous Data on BEA’s Multinational Enterprise Surveys
BEA employs automated data editing and imputation systems to process a subset of its multinational enterprise (MNE) surveys. Until recently, all of the auto-editing systems used at BEA were built around the Banff system for data editing and imputation produced by Statistics Canada, which runs in… Read more
Theoretical Inflation for Unavailable Products
Theoretical inflation diverges from official price statistics when products are unavailable due to stay-in-place behavior or due to stockouts caused by supply chain disruptions. In this paper, the word “theoretical inflation” designates inflation that is consistent with price measurement theory… Read more
Outlet Substitution Bias Estimates for Ride Sharing and Taxi Rides in New York City
The arrival of new merchants poses problems for measuring inflation, and many think the resulting biases in the official statistics are nontrivial. The BLS methods treat identical commodities sold by different merchants as distinct, different goods but to the extent the goods are close… Read more
The Feasibility of a Quarterly Distribution of Personal Income
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) conducted a feasibility study to evaluate whether it is possible to produce a quarterly distribution of personal income and construct inequality metrics that are valid, informative, and transparent. The primary obstacles to producing such estimates are… Read more
The Contribution of Reallocation to U.S. GDP Growth: Measurement Using Tiered Aggregation
Resources moving from less productive to more productive sectors can increase aggregate output without any underlying change in production technology, yet the impact of these reallocations is challenging to measure because it involves measuring unobserved counterfactual production where… Read more
Tracking Cultivated Assets in Measures of Capital
Americans invested $72 billion in cultivated assets in 2019. By category, investment was: $7 billion in long-lived food animals, $2 billion in horses, $10 billion in farm plants, and $53 billion in landscaping plants. System of National Accounts 2008, the internationally agreed… Read more
Tracking Marijuana in the National Accounts
The internationally agreed guidelines for national economic accounts, System of National Accounts 2008 (United Nations Statistics Division 2008), explicitly recommend that illegal market activity should be tracked together with legal market activity. This recommendation is not currently… Read more
Estimating Regional Price Parities Using New Data on Medical Goods and Services
I report on a project to improve estimates of Regional Price Parities (RPPs) by making use of a large commercial dataset on health care prices, the Health Marketscan dataset. Using the new data, I obtain estimates of regional price levels for health related goods and services that are stable… Read more
Work Context and Industrial Composition Determine the Epidemiological Responses in a Multi-Group SIR Model
Key economic indicators, such as GDP and unemployment rates, provide a useful backdrop for assessing the state of the economy. However, more nuanced statistics can be of use during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we extend the domain of relevance for economic statistics by developing a… Read more
Assessing Residual Seasonality in the U.S. National Income and Product Account Aggregates
There is an ongoing debate on whether residual seasonality is present in the estimates of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in U.S. national accounts and whether it explains the slower quarter-one GDP growth rate in the recent years. This paper aims to bring clarity to this topic by 1)… Read more