After the boom comes the bust, or so we are told. One of the more interesting questions for North Dakota is the extent of the pain, if any, felt during the bust, and how it ends up distributed across the state. To help answer this question we need to continue analysis of the circumstances of growth in North Dakota during this century. Call it a Nearby Economic History.  A better understanding of the process of economic growth in the state is 1) important in its own right (knowledge for its own sake is seldom bad), and 2) potentially useful information as the state discusses policies going forward.

Continue reading Continuing Explorations in ND Growth

Read more

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: the information contained here is not a predictive model of the outcome of the election and it is nothing official from UND. It is me on my own time putting this together because of some of the questions from JT on the radio show. As far as the predictive aspects, there are too many moving parts and too little data to adequately model the outcome at this point. We can develop numerous rules and test them as outcomes, but at the end it will still be a subjective probability model.

Continue reading UND Nickname Vote Share Calculator

Read more

One of the questions I hear constantly has to do with the impact, or potential impact, of an industry on the local economy in Grand Forks. To be clear, there are no clear rules on which industries will have the highest impact. There are multiple factors influencing such outcomes, such as the supply chain factors in the local economy, the response of the consuming public, whether the business is in a “new” industry from the perspective of the local economic portfolio or will be competing with existing firms, and so on.

Continue reading Impactful Industries – Local Economic Impact Edition

Read more

I enjoy baseball and the statistical aspects of the game. In the past I played fantasy baseball, football, and basketball with friends and family. We played for bragging rights mostly. I never played one of these daily fantasy leagues or the money games currently out there. It seems like gambling to me, and I am not a big gambler. So I am watching with a bit of interest how the investigations proceed against these companies. At the very least I think they will be in for some regulation or scrutiny of some kind in the future.

Continue reading Baseball and Gambling

Read more