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.
Value of Data: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch in the Digital Economy
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal demonstrates that there is no such thing as a free lunch in the digital world. Online platform companies exchange “free” digital goods and services for consumer data, reaping potentially significant economic benefits by monetizing data. The… Read more
Strategic movement of intellectual property within U.S. multinational enterprises
Strategic behavior by U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs) to shift profits between countries to reduce their worldwide tax burden has been well studied. Much of the existing research has focused on the use of debt payments and intrafirm intellectual property licensing agreements to explain why… Read more
Modeling and Forecasting Income Inequality in the United States
Recently, an idea has emerged that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer”. Using tax data from Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2017) (updated in the World Wealth& Income Database) and internal microdata from the Current Population Survey (1975-2015),this paper models… Read more
Structural Estimates of Depreciation from Wholesale Auctions of Used Ford Windstar Vans
This paper estimates the depreciation of over twenty varieties of Ford Windstar passenger vans, using several hundred thousand observations from a deep collection of wholesale auction transactions. The data permit the estimation of individual vehicle ages apart from differences between resale-… Read more
Backcasting the BEA/BLS Integrated Industry-level Production Account and the Sources of U.S. Economic Growth between 1987 and 2016
"The Complexity of Billing and Paying for Physician Care
The administrative costs of providing health insurance in the US are very high, but their determinants are poorly understood. We advance the nascent literature in this field by developing new measures of billing complexity for physician care across insurers and over time, and by estimating them… Read more
Assessing the Automated Imputation of Missing and Erroneous Survey Data: A Simulation-Based Approach
Defining and Measuring the Digital Economy
This paper, made possible by support from the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), describes the work of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to develop estimates towards the construction of a new digital economy satellite account. These… Read more
Valuing Owner-Occupied Housing: an empirical exercise using the American Community Survey (ACS) Housing files
In Aten (2017) the rental equivalence method was applied to the owner-occupied housing (OOH) stock in the United States to impute the flow of housing services for the period 2000-2015. The rents were based upon the American Community Survey and were broken into seven types of structure, vintage… Read more
Experimental Estimates of Wages and Gross Output by Business Size and Industry, 2002-2012
This paper presents experimental estimates of wages and gross output by business size and industry sector for 2002-2012. We find small businesses, those employing less than 100 workers, experienced relatively slower growth between 2002 and 2012 for both wages and gross output compared to larger… Read more