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.
Chain Drift in Leading Superlative Indexes
Chain drift is the difference between the rate of change calculated by chaining an index over a multi period interval and that obtained using endpoints only. This intransitivity can produce ambiguity in estimated growth rates if the “correct” linking interval is not known. The present paper… Read more
Evaluating and Adjusting for Chain Drift in National Economic Accounts
Chain drift is the difference between the rate of change calculated by chaining an index over a multi period interval and that obtained using endpoints only. More generally, different linking intervals yield different estimates. In this paper, procedures are suggested for evaluating the severity… Read more
Report on Interarea Price Levels
This report describes the estimation of differences in price levels across 38 geographic areas in the United States. It is based on prices collected for the 2003 Consumer Price Index (CPI) comprising eight expenditure components: Apparel, Education, Food and Beverages, Housing, Medical Goods and… Read more
Importance of Data Sharing to BEA
Why Are Semiconductor Price Indexes Falling So Fast?: Industry Estimates and Implications for Productivity Measurement
By any measure, price deflators for semiconductors fell at a staggering pace over much of the last decade, pulled down by steep declines in the deflator for the microprocessor (MPU) segment. These rapid price declines are typically attributed to technological innovations that lower constant-… Read more
Differences in Hedonic and Matched-Model Price Indexes: Do the Weights Matter?
This note uses scanner data for over 60 segments of consumer information technology (IT) and electronic goods to construct matched-model indexes. Virtually all of the segment-level indexes constructed with these data show price declines that reflect quality increases—a typical exception is… Read more
Moore's Law, Competition and Intel's Productivity in the Mid-1990s
Alternative Measures of U.S. Economic Activity in Business Cycles and Business Cycle Dating
The paper looks at the 10 recessions since World War II, and compares them to both monthly and quarterly indicators of general economic activity. It finds that four monthly measures emphasized by the NBER’s dating committee do not fully agree with the official peak and trough months, but that—as… Read more
Further Integrating BEA's Economic Accounts: Introducing Annual Input-Output Estimates into the Gross State Product by Industry Accounts
The December 2004 release of the GSP estimates takes BEA’s integration efforts one-step further, an important long-term goal in BEA’s Strategic Plan. Specifically, due to the concurrent release and integration of the annual IO accounts and the GDP-by-industry accounts and the resulting… Read more