National Income

Income Statements

Mission: Improve our understanding of the US economy

What we do: Gather publicly available data and transform it in a manner that promotes analysis

Deliverables:

Income Statements: We publish “income statements” for the aggregate US economy as well as for several stratifications. Every day our system checks the data vendor for new information, updates the income statements, and pushes to the url’s nearby.
- The BEA does not, to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing, organize the data to conform to a traditional corporate finance “Income Statement”.
- My attempts to reclassify line items and reorganize the data are intended for ease of interpretation. There will be discrepancies between the BEA’s NIPA and traditional corporate finance accounting concepts. All errors are my own.
Exploratory Analyses: We publish vast amounts of EDA in the form of slide decks for each component of the income statements, across each of the stratifications possible. Every day our system checks the data vendor for new information, updates the EDA, and pushes to the url’s nearby.

Data:

Our primary data source is the BEA’s NIPA (National Income and Product Accounts)
This data is typically updated quarterly, with monthly revisions
We also leverage FRED as an intermediary for data extraction, where helpful
Our systems programmatically check these data vendors daily to ensure we have the most recent information available
Although the BEA NIPA are wonderfully complete, the data must be processed in order to accomodate long term historical analysis.
Here is our current data Schema , which will be updated as our project matures.
Link to git repo with updated data files

The BEA has a precise definition of “National Income”
I use that term in a more colloquial context to connect to the corporate finance notion of an “Income Statement” for our entire nation (see below)
This “National Income” can be decomposed in many ways
- By Industry in which the activity takes place (e.g. Manufacturing, Utilities,etc…)
- By Legal Entity that earns the income (e.g. Corporations, Sole Proprietors, etc…)

Accounting Concept	NIPA Concept
Gross Revenues (Gross Sales)	Gross Output
COGS	Intermediate Inputs
Gross Profit	Value Added (Gross) aka GDP
OpEx (SG&A = Labor)	Compensation of Employees
OpEx (SG&A = Other)	Tax on products and imports, less subsidies
EBITDA	Gross Operating Surplus
Depreciation	Consumption of Fixed Capital
Operating Income (EBIT)	Net Operating Surplus
Interest Expense	Net Interest and Miscellaneous Payments

For a use case of this data, you might be interested in these slides that I use within a Business Economics course I teach in the Duke Economics Department. Within the slides I illustrate how to use these national income statements in a top down hierarchical structure wherein the macro economy drives the national income, which drives sectors, which drive industries, which drive company income statements, all to varying degrees of heterogeneity.

This is a work in progress. Please let me know if you have comments/suggestions/questions.
Goals for Fall 2025:
- Ensure the the existing Income Statements are accurate
- Extend the breadth of the income statements for each of the industries and legal entities available
- Design, produce, automate, and publish basic EDA on each income statement line item across each of the national income stratifications
Goals for Spring 2026:
- Deepen the EDA
- Extend in one or more directions (e.g. Regional, Personal Income, Fixed Assets, etc…)
Thanks to Wenqi Cao (Scientific Program Manager) for her great assistance.