Question (Page 1 of 2) In this data exercise, you will be looking at the re

(Page 1 of 2)
In this data exercise, you will be looking at the relationship between changes in real Gross Domestic Product and changes in unemployment rates for the various metropolitan areas in Florida. Notice that GDP is constructed at the metro-area level, so it is a bit different than what you have seen before for entire countries. You will need to proceed as follows:
(1) Get data on changes in GDP for all available time periods in Florida metro areas. Go to:
http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=70&step=1#reqid=70&step=1&isuri=1
and click on “Gross Domestic Product By Metro Area”, choose “Real GDP”, choose “All Industries”, select all metropolitan areas in Florida (you should have at least 19) with the unit of measure as “percent change from preceding period”, choose “all years”. It should now print a page for you, go ahead and download it as an xls file and open in excel. We are only interested in “all industries” calculations so cut the other rows. Cut columns for everything but the area name and the yearly % changes for each of the years.
(2) Get data on changes in unemployment by year for Florida. Go to the BLS website at: http://bls.gov/lau/#tables then under the “Metropolitan Area Data” section, go to “over- the year change in unemployment rates for metropolitan areas” and download data for each yearly change. You will need to individually find the data for the relevant metropolitan areas for the Florida metro areas from part (1) then, next to each relevant yearly change in the previous worksheet you made in part (1), create a column for the change in unemployment for those same years. Notice this is only relevant starting from the 2007-2008 yearly change. Insert the data you found from the BLS dataset into these columns.
(3) You will then need to create a new worksheet where you reorder the previously downloaded data so that you have something that looks like (do this for each of the 19 Florida metro areas…notice that Palm Coast can be dropped, where delta means “change in”):
??Delta Unemployment
Delta rGDP
???????Tampa 2007-2008 2008-2009 2009-2010
2010-2011 2011-2012
?????????????????????????????
Class: Econ 5050 Section: Dr. Neymotin (Page 1 of 2)
(4) Now you will use the above information to create 20 different charts (all placed in a new worksheet). 19 will be each separate metro area and the 20th will be for ALL the areas combined (i.e. you would just select ALL of each relevant column in making the chart rather than a subsection for that particular area). You will be graphing changes in unemployment on the x-axis and changes in real GDP on the y-axis. Title each table as “METRO AREA relationship” inserting the appropriate values for METRO AREA such as Tampa. Go ahead and insert 2 trendlines for each chart (click on each dataline to do this, and also insert the R- squared value as an option and the 3rd degree polynomial option while leaving all other options to their default setting). You should have axes labeled as well as the appropriate legends, and no “gridlines” visible in the chart so it looks cleaner. For the 20th chart, title it “Florida relationship”.
QUESTIONS:
1. In which area do the unemployment and real GDP patterns look clearest (either going the same direction or opposite directions). Explain why you see this in the chart. Can you present a hypothesis for why you are seeing this pattern? What other information might you want in order to check your hypothesis?
2. What has been happening in Florida in general in terms of unemployment over this time period? What about for GDP? How can you explain what has been happening?