Uncategorized – Page 30 – Barter is Evil

08 October 2014

Labor Force Projections in ND

Last week I was part of a business roundtable for Congressman Kevin Cramer. There were several topics discussed but I presented some information about the labor force in the North Dakota metropolitan and micropolitan areas. I calculated three-year and one year monthly growth rates and then projected out the labor force based on those rates. This is an inherently linear projection method which is less than desirable but the inherent nonlinearities in the ND data are somewhat difficult to identify.

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02 October 2014

Home Vacancy Rate

I thought I would switch focus a little bit on the housing issue. The discussion largely is a matter of price and availability. As I mentioned before, we really do not have a large number of sales that give us the ability to suggest markets are working well at any given time in most housing markets. That does not mean we automatically assume a market failure though.

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25 September 2014

Quick NFL Post – Radio follow up

If you heard the first part of my appearance on the Jarrod Thomas Show today you probably thought you got the radio station wrong. The topic was sports, and NFL football in particular. This is clearly not my favorite topic. I am not an NFL fan or viewer, but the question asked, more of an assignment JT gave me, was the statistical evaluation of Christian Ponder, Eli Manning, and Bret Favre at the same points of their career. This means looking at the first three years of Manning’s and Favre’s career.

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25 September 2014

Home Prices: Who wins?

So I am jumping ahead a bit. There is much more to discuss as far as the implications of home price increases. I just read a fantastic article that correlates home price changes with changes in local fertility rates and so will look at Grand Forks in those terms too. However, the question was asked, by a friend of this website, why are we seeing all this about home prices?

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23 September 2014

Deeper than price alone

A proper investigation of issues in housing requires a look beyond the price. As I mentioned, price can be indicative of an issue, but is not the source or cause of the issue. In the same way your sore throat may be caused by a sinus infection, if you fail to look for the root cause you may treat the condition inappropriately.

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