Learn Input-Output Analysis
A self-contained tutorial track — from the basics of reading an I-O table through advanced multiplier, linkage, and structural-decomposition methods. Each tutorial includes worked examples, KaTeX equations, and embedded charts.
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01
What Is an Input-Output Table?
An input-output table maps every dollar of sales and purchases across all industries simultaneously, turning the economy into an accountable grid.
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02
Reading Supply and Use Tables
BEA builds U.S. input-output accounts from two interlocking tables — a Supply (Make) table and a Use table — that together enforce tight accounting identities across all 71 sectors.
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03
The Recipe Book: Technical Coefficients and the A Matrix
How the Use table is compressed into the A matrix — the economy's recipe book, where each column says exactly what inputs any industry must buy per dollar of its output.
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04
Total Requirements: The Leontief Inverse
Why inverting (I − A) reveals the full economy-wide ripple of any demand shock — and how the power-series intuition shows that even small direct coefficients compound into large total effects.
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05
Output, Income, and Employment Multipliers
The Leontief inverse delivers more than a solution to an equation — its column sums measure how much total economic activity a dollar of final demand triggers, and scaled versions trace income and employment ripples across all 71 sectors.
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06
Linkages and Key Sectors
Backward linkage measures how strongly an industry pulls from its suppliers; forward linkage measures how widely its output feeds into other industries. Rasmussen indices normalize both onto a common scale so you can spot the economy's strategic hinge-points.
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07
Structural Decomposition Analysis
How to split a change in total output between technology shifts and demand shifts — the SDA method, illustrated with U.S. manufacturing, 1997–2024.
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08
The Economy as a Network
Reframe the I-O table as a directed graph — industries are nodes, dollar flows are edges — and see why shocks to hub sectors ripple across the whole economy.
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09
Prices, Value, and Distribution
The dual of the quantity model — how input-output analysis traces cost-push price formation, embeds supply-chain labor, and illuminates the division between wages and profits.
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10
Vintages and Pitfalls
Using Leontief's 28 annual tables responsibly — the 1997 SIC-to-NAICS break, other methodological shifts, the A matrix dimension artifact, and how to download the data.