Graphs Assignment

"Good graphics equals good thinking"

Part 1

1. There has been much written about discrimination against women. The earnings data for males and females clearly indicates the following patterns. You are to determine the appropriate variables and then draw a graph that captures the essence of each of the statements.  The graphs should be graphs of earnings levels vs. age.

1. Women and men receive comparable starting salaries, but women receive smaller yearly increases as they get older.
2. The age-premium for women is higher for single nurses than for married nurses [age-premium means that as nurses get older the single nurses tend to get the largest raises].  You should draw the relationship between earnings and age.
3. The age-premium for high school educated men was higher than the age-premium for college educated women.
4. The age premium for high school educated workers is lower than that for college educated workers.  Also the age premium for high school educated workers begins to decline at age 50 and turns negative by age 60. 

2. Population biologists often discuss the concept of survivorship. For populations information on survivorship is summarized in survivorship schedules which give the percentage of individuals surviving to each particular age. These tables, an example of which appears below, can be conveniently represented in graphs.

Survivorship Table

From the following descriptions, produce the appropriate survivorship graph. [Be sure you have the correct axes - survivorship probabilities and age]

• Species A: Accidental mortality is kept to a minimum. Death comes to most members only when they reach the upper limit of the life span.
• Species B: The probability of death remains constant at every age. A fixed fraction of each age group dies (due to predators, accidents,..) in each unit of time.
• Species C: The vast majority perish quickly. Those individuals that do survive have a good chance of reaching maturity.

3. Draw a graph that best describes the verbal descriptions of the following relationships.

1. Tax revenue (T) increases as we raise the income tax rate (t) from $0 up to a certain rate t* at which point any further increase in the tax rate will result in lower tax revenues.
2. GNP for a fifty year period where the growth rate has remained constant throughout the period.
3. Company sales for next ten year when current sales are 10,000 and sales increase by 1,000 a year.
4. The relationship between the number of calories burned per minute (C) of running and age (A) if there is a decrease of 2 calories burned per minute with each year we age.
5. China's military power is currently less than the US but it is projected to grow at a faster rate than the US and some suggest that there will be a time in the 21st Century when China's military power will be greater than that of the US.
6. Demand for automobiles in Mexico is more responsive to prices than is demand for autos in the US.

4.  You will soon learn to create your own spiffy graphs, but now you are going to create one that is largely done by someone else given the wonders of modern technology.  You now have the ability to do in seconds what would have taken me hours to do not so many years ago.  To convince yourself that you can translate a picture (graph) into a story, I would like you to graph one economic variable which you can choose from the list at the Economic Time Series page.   For example what if you wanted to look at the unemployment rate.  You would go the Federal Reserve, St. Louis and then choose US Employment Data.  Once there you can pull up the Unemployment Rate and you will follow the directions to construct a graph of the unemployment rate by selecting GIF chart of this data.  You will get the following graph (or something close to it since it will continually change). 

If you then follow directions and direct it to create a graph showing the unemployment rate since 1948 you get the following diagram.

You should pick one of the variables that you have a basic understanding of and then graph it and explain in a paragraph what you see in the graph.   A REALLY neat map of unemployment that can be found at this site.  Good luck.   (Please be sure to staple the graph to a typed paragraph - or integrate them into one document).

5.  You are to work up answers to a few of the opening questions.  Specifically, you should answer the questions based on the last digit of your social security number.  The assignments are specified below. 

• 0,1,2,3,4               Should we raise sin taxes?
• 5, 6,7,8,9             Should we raise the fares?
• Extra                   What's happening down on the farm?

Part 2

1. So you want to create some graphs! The good news is that there are already some spreadsheets available electronically. You could go out and track down some tables on the Web-maybe using some of the locations identified on the Information Sources page or find some hard copy sources in the library. You are to construct one Pie, Bar, Stack, Area, Scatter, and Line graph which will be part of your portfolio for the course. As you develop your graphs, be sure that you choose data so that the graph which you choose is the best graph for that data.  Be most careful with the scatter diagram since this is the one which has traditionally caused people the most problem. 

2.  There are three parts to this question. Everyone should do one part based on the following scheme:

• 0,1,2              3a           
• 5, 6,7              3b 
• 3,4, 8,9          3c

Each of you should think of this as a question that will be answered with the use of some "new" data and a corrected graph.  

2a. You have heard much about the plight of the American worker, how the average earnings for workers in this country are falling. But what is the story? Do you buy into the story after you see the graph below. It is pretty clear that average wages have been rising since the end of W.W.II.

2b. The 1980s was a boom-bust period for real estate in the US-especially in the Northeast. One of the explanations advanced for the speculative boom in the early 1980s was that banks had been burned by foreign loans to developing countries in the early 1980s and as a result turned their attention to real estate in the US and flooded the market with money. The problem facing the developing countries was that they were incapable of paying loans at the high rates that existed in the early to mid 1980s. My concern is that I can see that interest rates actually fell during this period as you can see in the diagram below. So where is the problem?

3c. It is difficult not to notice what is happening in the stock market as it roars into uncharted territory. Things are so good in fact that some financial people are concerned we are reliving the 1920s and setting ourselves up for another stock market crash. Are we, or are we simply seeing a continuation of a rise that began as far back as the 1950s? What's the verdict given the past performance of the New York Sock Exchange Composite Index?