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Econ 570: Take-home exam

Spring 2023, Due April 14, midnight

Q: On the first day of class, we examined the relationship between GDP per capita and life expectancy across countries and over time. Recent economic research has focused on the inequality in health outcomes across income groups within the US. Your goal for this exam is to download and analyze US data on income and mortality to answer several questions. How has real income evolved over 1984-2016? How has mortality evolved, for children and young adults (ages 0-24), and for older adults (ages 25-64)? How has the relationship between income and mortality within the US changed over time, for the different age groups? The exam is intended to take no more than two hours, but you have a full week to complete it.

The details

Data: We have made CDC data on mortality available on the course website. You can find the data documentation here. Mortality for individuals aged xx-zz in the year yyyy are in the file named “mortality_yyyy_xx_zz.txt”. For example, “mortality_2016_25_64.txt” contains data for 2016, ages 25-64. The files can be opened as CSV files, but you must specify the option “sep='\t'”. Notice that there are extraneous rows at the bottom, which should be skipped. Focus on “Age Adjusted Rate” as the mortality variable. Each file is at the state level, so across all files you will have data at the year (1984 or 2016), by age group (ages 0-24 or 25-64), by state (50 states plus the District of Columbia). There are 204 observations total (2*2*51).

You can find data on real median household income for each state-year on FRED. You can pull data for each state XX using the code “MEHOINUSXXA672N”. For example, using the API to pull the codes [‘MEHOINUSMNA672N’, ‘MEHOINUSWIA672N’] would get you real income data by year for Minnesota (MN) and Wisconsin (WI). You are welcome to use other data or sources if you prefer but make sure they measure the same variables. You are welcome to use other data in your answer, as well.

Tip: you may find it helpful to find or create a dictionary or DataFrame that links US state names to their two-letter codes, as in {‘WI’: ‘Wisconsin’, ‘MN’: ‘Minnesota’}.

Submit:

1. You will submit one document (Word or PDF) that contains your answers to the questions. You are allowed a maximum of two exhibits and 500 words. If you like, one of your exhibits may be a table. You may use a facet plot as one of your exhibits if you like. The document should start with an “executive summary” that gives a concise report of your conclusions. The rest of the report provides the analysis and details. See the practice take-home exam for guidance on format.

2. You will submit one zip file containing the code that recreates any analysis reported in the document. Your code must be submitted as a Jupyter notebook, and it must work if we run it from the directory containing the mortality and any other data from your zip file. Do not modify the data files directly.

The medium: Your report will be viewed on a computer monitor.

The audience: Someone with general understanding of economics, but no specialized knowledge.

The message: For you to figure out!

This is an exam. The academic misconduct policy is in effect. You may use the internet and books, notes, etc., but you must not discuss this with anyone, or explicitly solicit answers to these questions online, via Chegg, ChatGPT, etc. Cite all sources.