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.
How can the American Community Survey (ACS) be used to improve the imputation of Owner-Occupied Rent Expenditures?
There are currently two major agencies, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), that produce estimates of the cost of shelter for renters and for owners on a regular basis. In addition, the Census Bureau is conducting a nation-wide survey, the American… Read more
Foreign Direct Investment Relationship and Plant Exit: Evidence from the United States
Previous research has shown that U.S. manufacturing plants belonging to U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) are more likely to shut down than other manufacturing plants, once plant and industry attributes have been controlled for (Bernard A. and Jensen B., 2007). This research has concentrated… Read more
Explaining Long-term Differences Between Census and BEA Measures of Household Income
Estimating the Price of Rents in Regional Price Parities
In May of 2011, BEA published prototype estimates of 5-year regional price parities for states and metropolitan areas for 16 expenditure classes, including rents, for the 2005-2009 period. In previous research (see: Aten & Reinsdorf [2010], Aten & Heston [2009]), differences in interarea… Read more
The Productivity Advantage and Global Scope of U.S. Multinational Firms
This paper examines whether the productivity of U.S. business establishments is related to the extent to which their parent firms are globally engaged-from being an exporter to being a fledgling multi-national that has taken a few cautious forays into foreign markets to being a seasoned… Read more
Geographic Variation in Commercial Medical-Care Expenditures: A Framework for Decomposing Price and Utilization
This study introduces a new framework for measuring and analyzing medical-care expenditures. The framework focuses on expenditures at the disease level that are decomposed between price and utilization. We find that both price and utilization differences are important contributors to expenditure… Read more
Human Capital Accounting in the United States: Context, Measurement, and Application
This study updates Christian's (2010) human capital account for the United States to the year 2009, refining the underlying data and putting the account into international context by reviewing applications in the rest of the world. It also measures the sensitivity of human capital measures to… Read more
Estimating the Local Economic Impacts of University Activity Using a Bill of Goods Approach
Economic impact analyses for universities often produce impacts so large that they are viewed with suspicion. Using data collected from universities on actual expenditures as well as the local share of these expenditures to calibrate and regionalize custom economic impact multipliers will… Read more
Notes on Estimating the Multi-Year Regional Price Parities by 16 Expenditure Categories: 2005-2009
Tables (XLS)
Competition among Spatially Differentiated Firms: An Estimator with an Application to Cement
We develop an estimator for models of competition among spatially differentiated firms. In contrast to existing methods (e.g., Houde (2009)), the estimator has flexible data requirements and is implementable with data that are observed at any level of aggregation. Further, the estimator is the… Read more