Labor economics;

This question asks you to retrieve data from CANSIM (Statistics Canada's database). Once you have the data, any spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel or Cale from the OpenOffice Suite, will work well for our purposes. You can access CANSIM through the library website by searching for "Cansim" under "Databases" on the library's home page. Once you connect to CANSIM @ CHASS, you should be able to click on "CANSIM Multidimensional view", "Vital economic and social statistics about Canada" and "National accounts" to easily access the data. (Note: If you try this from off-campus, you may need to use the Queen's library webpage and click the 'Connect from Off-Campus'; for more info, under the Databases tab, follow the links 'More Database Options" and 'About off-campus access' if you haven't already set up a 'web-proxy') In the section "By expenditure (chained 2002 dollars)", for the period 1981-0-01 to 2012-06-30 select the "Gross domestic product (GDP) at market prices" series (v1992067). In the section "Personal income - By spending (in chained 2002 dollars) ", retrieve the following 3 series: Personal expenditure on durable goods (v1992110), Personal expenditure on non-durable goods (v1992118), and Services (v1992119). Notice that the data are quarterly and seasonally adjusted. To simplify the analysis, consider all the series in billions of dollars, namely divide each series by 1, 000, 000, 000. Note: it might be easier if you select "the spreadsheet " option, and save the data as Text files one at a time. Then you can import the files in the spreadsheet, and copy the series in the same workbook.) a) Plot the four series (over time) on the same graph. To improve readability, for GDP use a "secondary axis". Provide some comments on their behavior. b.1) The growth rate (g) of a variable z between dates f and f + 1 is defined as: Calculate the growth rate of real GDP and report the average growth rate over the sample period. Note that, in computing the sequence of growth rates, you lose one observation at the beginning of the sample. b.2) A useful mathematical result states that the first difference of the log is approximately equal to the growth rate: Take the natural logarithm of the GDP series (Excel command "=In(series)"). Then compute its ap- proximate growth rate with this alternative method and comment on the quality of the approximation. b.3) Plot the four growth rate series on two separate graphs: GDP and Services in the first; Durables and Non-durables in the second. Comment. c.1) The standard deviation of a (random) variable is a measure of how much the variable is concentrated around its mean (Excel command "=stdev(series)"). Compute the standard deviations of the four variables' growth rates for the full sample and report them (use the log first difference series as the growth rate).Year 1 Year 2 Output ( Wheat 250 200 Output (Corn) 100 150 Output (Barley) 50 75 Employment (Wheat) 500 505 Employment (Corn) 100 101 Employment (Barley) 2(0) 202 Price of Wheat (per unit) 51.00 $1.50 Price of Corn (per unit) $3.00 $2.50 Price of Barley (per unit) $1.50 $2.00 Table 1: Question 2