Economics

I resisted writing anything specific about Brexit and North Dakota for a time now. Part of the issue was it was all too soon; natural experiments of this scale are not something economists expect to just fall in their lap. There were many questions about the implications of the event for North Dakota, which as we will see is probably minimal in terms of direct relevance. With the benefit of a little temporal distance we can address this in a manner devoid of (some of) the immediate hysteria.

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So the BEA release (follow this link to the data) this week revealed a large decline in North Dakota GDP from 2014 to 2015. Not a real surprise. As a minor note, I prefer to use the quarterly data instead of the annual data, not because it tells a very different story, but there are some distinctions. That is what I will be using in this discussion. I am also looking at the real GDP data to control for inflation changes over this time.

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