ST 610N -- Fall 2006 
     HOMEWORK 6 
   DUE THURSDAY, 30 November 2006 

   EXERCISE 

 Recall the datasets of health information at the county level
 for the state of North Carolina that you looked at in Homework #5.
 Now your task in to relate that information to economic data.

 The economic data are in the file NCCounty03q4.txt, a tab-delimited
 file of selected economic data for each county.  The list of variables
 is given in the file NCCounty.variables.  These files, and all of
 the files for this homework are in the nc2006 directory.
 
 Your assignment is to describe the health measures and investigate
 some relationships with the economic data.  Particularly appropriate
 would be correlations (proc corr) or crosstabulations (proc freq),
 as well as scatterplots.  Your work should take the form of a report
 or letter to a state legislator advocating some legislative action,
 such as spending more (or less) for something, supported by your 
 analysis and/or figures.

 As before, part of your task is to describe the data.  Use tables,
 charts, figures as appropriate, and make sure to use labels and
 titles.  Use of user-written formats is encouraged.  The text should
 take 1-2 pages, with 1-3 pages of tables/figures/charts.

 Note:
 1) Your audience should be state legislators, not other students,
    or me, or NC Office of Fiscal Research.
 2) Be aware that many counties in North Carolina are quite small,
    both in area and population, and so that analysis of count data
    from these counties requires care.  My suggestion is to limit
    your analysis to the largest counties, and avoid the smallest.
 3) This is not intended as an exercise in model/variable selection
    in multiple regression, although such an analysis is not actively
    discouraged.