Papers

Ongoing structural change in the U.S. economy due, in part, to globalization, the spread of information and communications technology, and the Great Recession, has reinforced the need for an up‐to‐date decomposition of aggregate GDP to industry‐level sources of growth. This approach, typically… Read more

The decade ending in 2007 was a period of rapid sourcing substitution for manufactured goods consumed in the US. Imports were substituted for local sourcing, and patterns of supply for imports changed to give a large role to new producers in emerging economies. The change in the price paid by… Read more

This introductory chapter to the NBER/CRIW conference volume that is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press contains an overview of the papers that were presented at a meeting of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth in November 2010 and that are included in the conference… Read more

This paper takes a different approach to estimating demand for medical care that uses the negotiated prices between insurers and providers as an instrument. The instrument is viewed as a textbook “cost shifting” instrument that impacts plan offerings, but is unobserved by consumers. The paper… Read more

To better understand productivity and inflation in the health sector, health economists have advocated tracking the cost of treatment by disease over time. However, there are several methods for measuring the cost of treatment, and little work has been done to understand how different approaches… Read more

One of the innovations of the Supplemental Poverty Measure is to make adjustments in the official poverty threshold to account for geographic price level differences, particularly for differences in the cost of shelter as measured by rents. A more recent initiative is to estimate thresholds that… Read more

Lack of statistical data on interregional trade in services often leads regional input-output (I-O) models to rely on assumptions about the degree to which services are imported from other regions. One advantage of using an I-O model is that it provides the flexibility to tailor the basic model… Read more

Many universities report results based on input-output (I-O) analysis to promote the contribution that they make to a regional economy. How these results are obtained is not always clear. Nor are they always based on best practices. This paper presents best practices when using a regional I-O… Read more

In the 2013 comprehensive revision of the National Income and Product Accounts, BEA introduced a new accrual treatment of defined benefit pension plans based on actuarial estimates of liabilities and normal costs. Accrual accounting is the preferred method for compiling national accounts because… Read more

Disease-based medical care expenditure indexes are currently of interest to measurement economists and have been the subject of several recent papers. These papers, however, produced widely different results for medical care inflation and also varied in the datasets and methods used, making… Read more