This blog contains posts and comments written by students in Dr. Tufte's economics classes at Southern Utah University.
2/27/2005
Increasing Unemployment
In the article Jobless claims up more than expected it talks about how the number of claims for unemployment are up in last couple of weeks. The labor department says that there are no events that would have caused this rapid increase in unemployment. Is this just the way the market works or is this just a fluke that happened?
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1 comment:
How is this related to ManEc?
There is a good example of the use of moving averages in this article.
My specific answer to this is that I don't have any idea.
My guess is that it doesnt' mean much.
Nonetheless, I can tell you that answering this sort of question is why we make business majors take statistics, and that getting a solid answer is no harder than getting the data off the internet and doing some hypothesis testing. Not having done that, but being a macroeconomist, my feel for this data is that down and upswings of 20,000 or so don't mean that much. I would be more worried if it went up by 5,000 every week for a few months.
Also, this is a good application of the moving averages we learned about in Chapter 5. The four week moving average of this measure is down, suggesting that this week's upswing is a fluke.
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