The Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts of the United States

49 Pages Posted: 8 Jan 2013

See all articles by Marco Cagetti

Marco Cagetti

University of Virginia; Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Elizabeth Holmquist

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Lisa Lynn

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

Susan Hume McIntosh

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

David Wasshausen

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

Date Written: January 7, 2013

Abstract

The integrated macroeconomic accounts (IMAs), produced jointly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), present a sequence of accounts that relate income, saving, investment in real and financial assets, and asset revaluations to changes in net worth. In this paper we first provide some background information on the IMAs and on their construction. Next, we discuss the usefulness of the IMAs, focusing for instance on the evolution of household net worth and its components, a set of series that has appeared frequently in discussions of the causes and effects of the recent financial crisis. We also discuss some of the challenges associated with integrating nonfinancial and financial data sources, that is, the current and capital accounts statistics from BEA's national income and product accounts (NIPAs) and the financial account statistics from FRB's flow of funds accounts (FFAs). In the final section, we discuss future plans for improving the IMAs, including a proposed framework and methodology for breaking out the financial business sector into three subsectors: 1) Central bank, 2) Insurance and pension funds, and 3) Other financial business.

Keywords: integrated macroeconomic accounts, flow of funds, national income and product accounts

JEL Classification: E01, C82

Suggested Citation

Cagetti, Marco and Cagetti, Marco and Holmquist, Elizabeth and Lynn, Lisa and Hume McIntosh, Susan and Wasshausen, David, The Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts of the United States (January 7, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2197527 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2197527

Marco Cagetti (Contact Author)

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago ( email )

230 South LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL 60604
United States

University of Virginia ( email )

1400 University Ave
Charlottesville, VA 22903
United States

Elizabeth Holmquist

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ( email )

20th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20551
United States

Lisa Lynn

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

1441 L Street NW
Washington, DC 20910
United States

Susan Hume McIntosh

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ( email )

20th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20551
United States

David Wasshausen

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) ( email )

1441 L Street NW
Washington, DC 20910
United States

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