Flynnglis's Posts

So yesterday I looked at how the oil patch core counties (Dunn, McKenzie, Mountrail, Williams) are responsible for over 50% of the employment increase in North Dakota in the last year (posting). I thought I would look at those particular counties again and compare to the state overall. I looked at the percentage change of employment from year ago levels. This should remove a majority of the seasonal effects in the data though we can never be sure. For September the state was up 2.88% from year ago levels. Williams county was up 6.82% from a year ago, Mountrail county was up 11.54%, Mckenzie county was up 21.62% and Dunn county was up 19.04%. For comparison, the percentage changes for Burleigh, Cass, and Grand Forks counties over the same time period were 1.44%, 1.14%, and -0.99%, respectively. For McKenzie county the average percentage change from a year ago level over the last 12 months was above 20%.

Continue reading A further look at oil and employment in North Dakota

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What is the importance of the oil industry to employment in North Dakota? This is a really good question, and one that is not necessarily the easiest to answer. In the last year this same question generated all kinds of arguments about the relative importance of agriculture versus oil in the North Dakota economy. That debate is not the purpose of this post though.

Continue reading Oil and employment in North Dakota

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I would file this under the heading, we need to be seen doing something. The Fed has come up with a limit to the size of banks based on the amount of liabilities of the firm (WSJ story). This is where the combination of free market ideas and risk mitigation come into conflict. One of the first questions I ask my students in bank regulation is, “Is big necessarily bad?” What we do going forward is not clear, but this regulation isn’t going to affect current banks, as in make them get smaller. So how have we really changed things? We haven’t, but it looks like we are doing something.

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You can tell it is an election year. There are all kinds of polls being done (my household answered more than a few) about all types of issues. I heard some discussion (and if I can remember where I will post any available link) about how is North Dakota doing, as in an attitudinal survey. My guess is that people will say, overall, that North Dakota is doing well. I am not a huge advocate of such surveys because they typically seem too vague to me. I prefer to track more definite numbers when possible. Here is median income in North Dakota and the United States.

Continue reading Median Income Comparison

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