BEA's Regional Economic Accounts Program: Recent and Planned Improvements

This article highlights recent improvements and plans for further improvements to each of BEA’s major regional economic accounts programs. The improvements focus on the acceleration of release of the estimates and on the preparation of new and extended estimates. There also is a brief discussion on BEA’s research effort to improve the regional accounts.JEL Classification E010     

Heterogeneity and Share Contracting in Medical Group Practices

This paper offers an empirical analysis of the relationship between income sharing rules and physician heterogeneity in medical group practices.The economies to group formation associated with risk–sharing, mutual monitoring,and internal referral are served by sharing at least a portion of group income equally. Sharing group income equally is problematic, however, when group members differ in their contribution to group income. Member contributions to group income may differ because of differences in ability, effort, or the price of services across specialty fields. The analysis below is addressed to the question of how income sharing rules in physician groups are affected by variation in member contributions. The analysis finds evidence that heterogeneity in member contributions to group income limits the use of equal income sharing rules in multispecialty groups relative to single specialty groups, and large groups relative to small groups. Nevertheless, 65% of all groups in the survey share at least a pn of group income equally, which broadly suggests that the joint surplus enhancement from risk sharing, mutual monitoring, and internal referral are sufficient to overcome the incentive problems of such rules     

Multiple regimes and cross-country growth behaviour

This paper provides some new evidence on the behaviour of cross-country growth rates. We reject the linear model commonly used to study cross-country growth behaviour in favour of a multiple regime alternative in which different economies obey different linear models when grouped according to initial conditions. Further, the marginal product of capital is shown to vary with the level of economic development. These results are consistent with growth models which exhibit multiple steady states. Our results call into question inferences that have been made in favour of the convergence hypothesis and further suggest that the explanatory power of the Solow growth model may be enhanced with a theory of aggregate production function differences.     

Foodcrop Demand in Indonesia: A Systems Approach

Aggregate agricultural commodity demand parameters are estimated, based on an application of the Deaton and Muellbauer Almost Ideal Demand System to a seventeen year Indonesian time-series data set of prices, expenditures and consumption availability. The statistical results are generally significant and correctly signed. The revealed demand relationships imply that the Indonesian food Staples are normal goods. Expenditure elasticities are higher for the higher value foodstuffs than for the lower value starchy staples. Furthermore, the demand for rice has become highly inelastic to both own and cross-price interventions. This implies that rice price interventions will require a high degree of fine-tuning in order to stabilise prices effectively, and that low urban rice prices cannot be regarded as an appropriate, or even second best policy instrument for improving nutritional status.

A high degree of Substitution between rice and secondary food crops, and amongst groups of secondary food crops, is identified. The significance of the cross-price elasticities for the secondary food crops suggests that single-market interventions will have non-trivial budget-mediated effects in other commodity markets. The management of a multi-commodity food policy requires that the spillover effects from commodity pricing policy must be taken into account in order to optimise the effects of price policy interventions.     

Small firm mutual funds: Additional evidence on the small firm effect

Returns generated with small firm mutual fund data are used to examine the extent to which identification of a small firm effect is due to the difficulty in measuring the direct and indirect transaction costs involved in investing in the common shares of small capitalization stocks. Little if any evidence of the excess risk-adjusted returns is obtained for either of the period 1978–1983, when the small firm effect was observed, or the period 1984–1989, when it was not. The small firm effect may therefore be attributed to (1) higher direct transaction costs including bid-ask spread and broker fees and (2) higher indirect transaction costs including portfolio management expenses and market impact costs.The authors thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Brett Salazar for valuable assistance in data collection. Errors remain our own.