Economic Research Methods

What is necessary to assess the accuracy of a DBEDT forecast?

• Treat the projected result as final immediately
• Replace old projections with revised predictions
• Compare its original projection with later observed outcomes
• Compare it only with another unrelated forecast

Why preserve each DBEDT forecast’s original issue date?

• Dates have no influence on research
• Forecast assumptions and available evidence change over time
• Forecasts are never revised
• Only the most recent estimate exists historically

What does a slowdown in Hawaii’s nominal GDP growth fail to establish on its own?

• A change in current-dollar values
• A change in the recorded indicator
• An equally sized slowdown in real production
• A need to compare price effects

Which set gives a multidimensional view of Hawaii’s tourism exposure?

• Visitor spending alone repeated four times
• Jobs, value added, spending, and fiscal receipts separately
• Only hotel room color
• Only international airline logos

Why can high GDP per capita coexist with housing stress in Hawaii?

• GDP per capita guarantees low housing costs
• High output always means equal wages
• Output per person does not measure affordability for typical residents
• Housing prices are excluded from all economic analysis

Through which channel can island shipping costs affect living costs?

• Reduction of the Pacific Ocean’s width
• Prices of imported goods and intermediate inputs
• Elimination of local storage
• Free distribution of every imported good

What determines the scale of a negative air-travel shock to Hawaii’s economy?

• Only the names of the airlines
• Only the number of mountains
• Visitor demand exposure and how firms adjust
• A fixed percentage unrelated to demand

Which comparison correctly distinguishes nominal and real GDP in Hawaii?

• Nominal GDP removes prices; real GDP counts only visitors
• Real GDP measures only tax receipts
• Nominal GDP uses current prices; real GDP adjusts for inflation
• Both exclude service-sector value added

What do BEA state GDP estimates allocate to states?

• Total nationwide retail sales by tourist address
• Value added by location of production
• Only resident wages deposited in banks
• All federal tax collections by ZIP code

Why should researchers avoid simply adding chained-dollar GDP figures across industries?

• Chained-dollar measures are generally nonadditive
• They always equal nominal dollars
• They contain only employment counts
• They omit every price adjustment

Which set of indicators best distinguishes different dimensions of Hawaii’s economy?

• Only GDP measured four ways
• Only the number of islands
• Output, income, employment, and living standards
• Only a single tourism advertisement

Why is state GDP per capita insufficient for measuring income inequality?

• It directly reports every household’s wages
• It measures individual poverty status exactly
• It contains a complete income distribution
• It does not reveal how household income is distributed

What determines how visitor purchases translate into Hawaii’s local value added?

• Local production, imported inputs, and industry transactions
• Only the number of arrivals
• Only the airport runway length
• Only the state motto

Which method traces direct and indirect effects of visitor purchases across industries?

• Input-output analysis
• Radioactive dating
• Satellite image classification alone
• Electoral redistricting

Why can a Hawaii tourism multiplier depend heavily on imports?

• Every imported item is produced locally
• Imports create no change in economic flows
• Multipliers are constant in every economy
• Money spent on imported inputs leaks from local production chains