The topic of annual pay clearly was important to many callers last week and so I thought I would follow up with a bit of a different look at the issue. I wanted to take a look state wide at the hot spots for compensation. This is BLS QCEW data for all industries for all firm sizes. I ran it for the last ten years but we are going to look at three years, 2007, 2012, 2017.
So I exchanged text messages with a friend about local economic data last week, and they asked about the rate of inflation and wage gains and what was happening with that nationally and locally. Enough sources deal with the national picture that I decided to focus on the local picture for this post. I used the CPI (all urban consumers, national average), since that is what my friend discussed, to calculate the real value of annual pay for Grand Forks county.
With all the discussion surrounding migration these last many months I thought it time to revisit the issue with a specific look at North Dakota. There are many ways to evaluate this issue and I will not go through them all here in one post. These are things that need to be evaluated independently. The issue in this post is the thought that North Dakota has a problem attracting in people. As this first map reveals, that is not really the case.
I was thinking about North Dakota and the population shifts and changes of the the last few years. The economics of the state are so clearly connected to the population changes, which are clearly connected to the economic changes in the state too. There really is an intense and important feedback relationship between population and economics in this state in particular.
Continue reading North Dakota Population Change, Nature v. Nurture
I used the same data that I used for the map yesterday but plotted the ratio against median total earnings. Partly this was to see if there is a pattern to discern in North Dakota counties such as higher median earnings leading to an increasing or decreasing parity ratio. To assist in this examination, I added a linear regression line and a confidence interval and this is what I found.
Continue reading Male-Female Earnings Ratio in ND, A follow up