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 Increasing Pace of Weather-Related Cost Shocks: Should Net Domestic Product be Affected by Climate Disasters?

The monetary costs of weather and climate disasters in the U.S. grew rapidly from 1980 to 2022, rising more than five percent in real terms annually, and implying a faster depreciation of real assets. We argue that the expected depreciation from these events could be included in consumption of… Read more

Brian Sliker, Leonard Nakamura
WP2023-12
Published
JEL Code(s)C82, Q54

Marketing, Other Intangibles, and Output Growth in 61 United States Industries

Experts in the System of National Accounts (SNA) recently considered whether marketing could be included as a capital asset in the national accounts and later recommended that marketing should be an intangible in the 2025 SNA (IMF, 2022; IMF, 2023). This paper contributes to that discussion by… Read more

Leo Sveikauskas, Rachel Soloveichik, Corby Garner, Peter B. Meyer, James Bessen, Mathew Russell
WP2023-11
Published
JEL Code(s)M31, M37

A Direct Measure of Medical Innovation on Health Care Spending: A Condition-Specific Approach

While technological innovation is believed to be a key driver of spending growth, measuring this relationship is challenging. We address this challenge using a large database of cost-effectiveness studies, which we use to develop proxy measures of inno- vation for specific conditions. We connect… Read more

Abe C. Dunn, Lasanthi Fernando, Eli Liebman
WP2023-10
Published
JEL Code(s)E01, I10, O3

Experimental Ultimate Host Economy Statistics for U.S. Direct Investment Abroad

Following international guidelines, BEA statistics on bilateral U.S. direct investment abroad are compiled and presented by immediate partner economy. While this approach is well suited for many purposes, it can lead to difficulty in interpreting direct investment statistics, especially in… Read more

Kirsten Brew, Jessica Hanson, Ricardo Limés, Ryan Smith, Larkin Terrie
WP2023-9
Published
JEL Code(s)F21, F23

Measuring Digital Intermediation Services: Experimental Estimates of Gross Output for Rideshare, Travel Services, and Food/Grocery Delivery Service Platforms

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) produces economic statistics through its system of satellite accounts that highlight specialized areas of the economy that are not directly apparent in BEA’s official economic statistics published under the North American Industry Classification System… Read more

Tina Highfill, Brian Quistorff
WP2023-8
Published
JEL Code(s)E01, O4

Capitalizing Data: Case Studies of Tax Forms and Individual Credit Reports

Early papers on capitalizing data focused on complex digital data that are stored on supercomputers and managed by highly skilled computer scientists (Statistics Canada 2019) (Eurostat 2020) (Coyle 2022) (Calderon and Rassier 2022) (Mitchell et al. 2022). This paper studies two very different… Read more

Rachel Soloveichik
WP2023-7
Published
JEL Code(s)D14, E01, G14

Introducing Demographic Labor Market Data into the U.S. National Accounts

The U.S. gross domestic product and its foundational National Income and Product Accounts contain some of the most widely used and followed economic statistics in the world yet contain limited information on the labor market and almost no information on demographic groups. We build a new dataset… Read more

Jon D. Samuels
WP2023-6
Published
JEL Code(s)E01

Introducing Consumer Durable Digital Services into the BEA Digital Economy Satellite Account

Measuring the digital economy is a high priority for analysts of economic growth. We augment the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Digital Economy Satellite Account to include digital services provided by high-tech consumer durables. We find that including the service flow from these goods raises… Read more

Benjamin R. Bridgman, Tina Highfill, Jon D. Samuels
WP2023-5
Published
JEL Code(s)D13, E01

For What It’s Worth: Measuring Land Value in the Era of Big Data and Machine Learning

This paper develops a new method for valuing land, a key asset on a nation’s balance sheet. The method first employs an unsupervised machine learning method, kmeans clustering, to discretize unobserved heterogeneity, which we then combine with a supervised learning algorithm, gradient boosted… Read more

Scott Wentland, Gary Cornwall, Jeremy G. Moulton
BEA-WP2023-4
Published
JEL Code(s)E01

Consumption Zones

Local area data are important to many economic questions, but most local area data are reported using political units, such as counties, which often do not match economic units, such as product markets. Commuting zones (CZs) group counties into local labor markets. However, CZs are not the most… Read more

Andrea Batch, Benjamin R. Bridgman, Abe C. Dunn, Mahsa Gholizadeh
BEA-WP2023-3
Published
JEL Code(s)R12