Gun violence is one of the most widely-discussed topics in American society. Gun-related accidents and crimes take place literally every day. Shocking statistics of deaths and injuries as a result of gun violence can’t be missed. According to Gunviolencearchive.org, 51,700 incidents occurred in 2014 in the United States. More than 12,000 people were killed and 23,000 injured in accidents involving firearms. Perhaps the most terrible fact is that 628 children were killed or injured as a result of gun accidents last year.
Gross domestic product is commonly used to measure the economic performance of a country. GDP equals the value of all the goods and services produced in the economy minus the value of any goods or services used during the production process. Another name for this quantity is “value added.” Recently, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released data on GDP by industry for 2016. Today we will look at this data to see different industries’ contributions to the U.S. economy’s growth in the last year.
How much does the state of the economy affect jobs in the finance sector? According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns data, different industries in this sector exhibit significantly different patterns.
Most of all, we are interested in how finance jobs were affected by the 2007-08 crisis, and if they are influenced by financial markets.
Recently, we published a series of posts about the regional patterns in employment changes. Naturally, most of the time the greatest growth occurred in larger industries, such as hospitals or schools.
It would be interesting to see the same patterns specifically relating to small businesses in the Midwest. For this purpose, we focused on establishments with fewer than 10 employees so that our study includes sole proprietors as well as small firms.
We saw in a recent post that Prosper’s own rating system provides relatively accurate results. However, there is some confusion as to whether it takes returning borrowers into account. As we will show in this post, it is possible to improve upon the standard rating system, thanks to the fact that the number of previous Prosper loans is readily available.
Working from home is becoming more and more popular in the U.S. The number of people who prefer to use their own dwelling as a workplace increased slightly in the recent years. People who work 9 to 5 may start asking questions like, “who actually are home-based workers?” and “why don’t they fancy a typical job in the office?” There are main types of such workers: home workers, who work exclusively from home, home-based workers, who work from home partly or all the time, and mixed workers, who work both from home and from the office.
Gross output represents the market value of all services and goods produced in a nation’s economy. This value differs slightly from gross domestic product (GDP), which is often used to measure the economic performance of a country. Gross output consists of products sold to final consumers (the GDP) as well as products sold to other industries where it is used as material or input. Today we will explore historical data on the gross output of the U.S. economy provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
For a regular investor, the single most important field in the Prosper dataset is Prosper borrower rating. This is an estimate of a borrower’s creditworthiness based on various other metrics, including employment length, number of open accounts, prior delinquencies and many others. Based on the aggregate score, the borrowers are then split into seven groups: AA, A, B and so on. Alternatively, an investor may use numerical ratings ranging from 1 to 7, with 7 corresponding to the safest, most trustworthy borrowers.
Several posts we made previously focused on finding regional patterns in the employment numbers changes for U.S. regions. Unsurprisingly, the lists are dominated by industries from the larger sectors like healthcare and education.
What we would like to do next is to take a look at the distribution of the number of small businesses in the Northeast, both geographical and among industry sectors. In this series, we focus on the businesses falling into the first two columns of the County Business Profile data: establishments with fewer than 10 employees.
Nirad Inamdar, Ph.D. Student Economics and Business Environment
The Phillips curve is a mathematical study of the relationship between inflation and unemployment in an economy. We know that for any place or region — and consequently, for its government — some of the primary goals are:
high Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita
high trade deficit (more exports than imports)
low percentage of below poverty line (BPL) families
low unemployment
low inflation, especially of essential goods
However, achieving all of these goals at once is the economic equivalent of Utopia. It requires a veritable balancing act to manage these goals because they are conflicting in nature. Every year, administrators face a trade-off. One of these is between inflation and unemployment. Intuitively, we understand that to reduce unemployment, the government gives incentives and creates more jobs. While this increases the GDP output, it also reduces the supply of labor in the market. Ironically, the reduction in the available workforce makes labor costly and wages increase. This causes inflation.
