PAD-505 Exercises: To complete the first two exercises in this section, use the tables provided below.
1. Expenditure Anaysis in Current Dollars:
a. You are a fiscal analyst in the city's budget office. Complete the current-dollar portion of Table 4.4 analyzing the Health Department's expenditures; use the available data in Table 4.1.
b. Write a memo from you (as a fiscal analyst) to the budget director explaining the trends.
2. Expenditure analysis in Constant Dollars
a. In this exercise, you will complete the rest of the spreadsheet in Table 4.4 conducting the same analysis you did above, only you will convert all the dollars to constant dollars. This exercise allows you to adjust a spreadsheet for inflation. The technique is to convert current dollar expenditures using cost of living indexes to constant (real) dollars by removing inflation as a factor.
b. After you complete the spreadsheet calculating constant dollars, write a paragraph from you, as a fiscal analyst, to OMB's budget director. In it you will explain what differences you found when you controlled for inflation compared with thr first exercise when you did not control for inflation.
To complete the following two exercises, use the spreadsheet file titled "Budget Tools Chapter 04 Text Examples and Exercises.
3.Onthe "property Tax" sheet, there are property tax revenues from 1980 through 2006 for a U.S. city. The magnitude (thousand, millions, etc.) is not shown. In 2003 there was an approximately 15 percent tax increas phased in over two years. Assume that you are analyst working in year 2007; thus, a five-year forecast would continue through year 2012 (five years after 2007).
a. If you were to plan for a judgmental adjustment, what would it be?
b. Using the same grid as used in Table 4.3, make the best forecast through year 2012, do not make your judgmental adjustment.
c. Make an XY plot of your forecast beside the original data.
4. On the "Approval" worksheet are the the monthly averages of many diferent polls of presidential approval from September 2001 through July 2007. Past analysis suggests little evidence of seasonality.
a. Make an XY plot of these data.
b. Using the same grid as used in Table 4.3., make the best forecast through December 2008.
c. Make a new XY plot of the forecast beside the data.
d. Is there any reason why you might think the approval will not reach the forecast December 2008 value?