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.
Medical Care Expenditure Indexes for the US, 1980-2006
We construct historical medical care expenditure indexes (MCEs) for the US economy for the period 1980-2006, thus supplementing the MCEs provided in the BEA health account for the period 2001-2010 (Dunn et al, 2015). Comparing our MCEs to the official deflators used in the national accounts, our… Read more
New Estimates of Value of Land of the United States
Land is an important and valuable natural resource, serving both as a store of wealth and as an input in production. Previous attempts to measure the value of land of the United States have focused on indirect measures, inferring values based on the difference between the market value of real… Read more
Methods of Temporal Disaggregation for Estimating Output of the Insurance Industry
A variety of mathematical and statistical methods have been developed and applied by researchers to solve problems of temporal disaggregation, the process of estimating unobserved sub-annual series from observed annual values. Despite a vast body of work evaluating the ability of different… Read more
Estimating Regression-Based Medical Care Expenditure Indexes for Medicare Advantage Enrollees
I construct a disease-based medical expenditure index for Medicare Advantage (private plan) enrollees using data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey from 2001-2009. I create the indexes by modeling total health-care expenditure as a function of each respondent’s diagnoses. Total medical… Read more
Is Labor's Loss Capital's Gain? Gross versus Net Labor Shares
Labor share has been falling since the 1970s. I show that U.S. labor share has not fallen as much once items that do not add to capital, depreciation and production taxes, are netted out. Recent net labor share is within its historical range whereas gross share is at its lowest level. This… Read more
The Role of Industry Classification in the Estimation of Research and Development Expenditures
This paper uses data from the National Science Foundation’s surveys on business research and development (R&D) expenditures that have been linked with data from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database to produce consistent NAICS-based R&D time-series data based on the main… Read more
Using Disability Adjusted Life Years to Value the Treatment of Thirty Chronic Conditions in the U.S. from 1987-2010
Health care spending in the U.S. grew two trillion dollars from 1987 to 2010, a 400% increase, but our understanding of the value of that increase is limited. In this paper we determine the net value of spending at the disease level by assigning a monetary value to changes in health outcomes and… Read more
Private Defined Benefit Pension Plans in the U.S. National Accounts: Accrual Measures for the 2013 Comprehensive Revision
With the comprehensive revision of the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts published in July 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis introduced new accrual-based measures of income generated by defined benefit (DB) pension plans. In addition to the improved measurement, BEA introduced a… Read more
Expenditure Weights in the Regional Price Parities
Regional Price Parities (RPPs) are spatial price indexes that measure price level differences across regions, such as states or metropolitan areas (MSAs). RPP expenditure weights, an important component in RPP estimation, are based on Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey data from the Bureau of… Read more
The Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA)
On December 5, 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released, for the first time, prototype estimates from the new Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA). In this satellite account, we used an input-output (I-O) framework… Read more