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.
Implications of Utilization Shifts on Medical-Care Price Measurement
The medical-care sector often experiences changes in medical protocols and technologies that cause shifts in treatments. However, the commonly used medical-care price indexes reported by the BLS hold the mix of medical services .fixed. In contrast, episode expenditure indexes, advocated by many… Read more
Decomposing Medical-Care Expenditure Growth
Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for almost one-fifth of GDP in 2009. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the… Read more
A Prototype BEA/BLS Industry‐Level Production Account for the United States
In recent years, much interest has been paid to structural changes at the industry level in the United States economy and their implications for competitiveness. The most‐recent business cycle and subsequent recovery have furthered these interests in understanding the sources of economic growth… Read more
The Effect of the Business Cycle on the Methods Used for Seasonal Adjustment
Trends in Digitally-Enabled Trade in Services
Digitally-enabled services are those for which digital information and communications technologies (ICT) play an important role in facilitating cross-border trade in services. Improvements in ICT technologies and reductions in their costs could be expected to contribute to growth in trade in… Read more
Enhancing Public Understanding of Revisions to Preliminary Estimates: The U.S. Post-Recession Perspective on Revisions
Household Consumption Expenditures for Medical Care: An Alternate Presentation
Comparing Commercial Systems for Characterizing Episodes of Care
Payers are increasingly using episodes of care to measure and reward efficiency in health care. Much attention has been paid to the effects of different rules for assigning episodes to providers, but little to how individual costs are assigned to episodes. In this paper, we studied the extent to… Read more
Physician Market Power and Medical-Care Expenditures
We study the degree to which greater physician market power via consolidation leads to higher service prices in the commercially insured medical-care market. We also examine whether these potentially higher service prices translate into different levels of physician service utilization. We find… Read more
Valuation of Near-Market Endogenous Assets
For many kinds of assets, the growth rate of the real asset stock is a nonlinear function of the economic owner’s decision whether to invest or extract the asset. Examples within the economy are primarily biological assets, both privately owned (such as those found in aquaculature and… Read more