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.
The Value of Coverage in the Medicare Advantage Insurance Market
This paper examines the impact of coverage on demand for health insurance in the Medicare Advantage (MA) insurance market. Estimating the effects of coverage on demand poses a challenge for researchers who must must consider both the hundreds of benefits that affect out-of-pocket costs (OOPC) to… Read more
Comparing the Consistency of Price Parities for Regions of the U.S. in an Economic Approach Framework
International Supply Chains and the Volatility of Trade
The world trade collapsed in the most recent recession. Some analysts have suggested the increasing offshoring of the supply chain, or vertical specialization (VS) trade, can explain the apparent increase in volatility of trade over the business cycle. This paper develops a model of VS trade to… Read more
Implications of Consumer Heterogeneity on Price Measures for Technology Goods
Using a new dataset on household purchases of personal computers (PCs), we document positive correlations between buyers' incomes and the prices they pay for seemingly identical PCs. These results suggest that firms may be successful at separating the market and charging different prices to… Read more
The Impact of Competition on Technology Adoption: An Apples-to-PCs Analysis
We study the effect of market structure on a firm's decision to adopt a new technology in the personal computer industry. This industry is unusual because there exists two horizontally segmented retail markets with different degrees of competition: the IBM compatible (or "PC") platform and the… Read more
Changing Mix of Medical Care Services: Stylized Facts and Implications for Price Indexes
The utilization of health care services has undergone several important shifts in recent years that have implications for the cost of medical care. We empirically document the presence of these shifts for a broad list of medical conditions and assess the implications for price indexes. Following… Read more
Measuring Health Care Costs of Individuals with Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance in the U.S.: A Comparison of Survey and Claims Data
As the core nationally representative health expenditure survey in the United States, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is increasingly being used by statistical agencies to track expenditures by disease. However, while MEPS provides a wealth of data, its small sample size precludes… Read more
R&D and Other Intangible Assets in an Input-Output Framework: Experimental Estimates with U.S. Data
The U.S., along with many other countries, plans to adjust official economic statistics in coming years to recognize R&D and several other intangibles as capital assets. We present here experimental estimates of the impact of capitalized intangibles on industry output and industry value… Read more
Market Entry and Trade Weighted Import Costs
Trade costs have fallen surprisingly little given the large increase in international trade in the last 50 years. This paper examines whether trade costs are properly measured. I show theoretically that trade weighted measures will underestimate the changes in trade costs when there are fixed… Read more
Human Capital Accounting in the United States: 1994 to 2006
This paper presents measures of the human capital stock and of investment in human capital for the United States between 1994 and 2006. When both market and non-market production are included, the stock of human capital was equal to about three quarters of a quadrillion dollars in 2006, of which… Read more