Problem
To study GDP, we want to look at each of its components. Luckily, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis has a database the presents the entire GDP release in the format of its release, but along with all of the historical data as well and with some easy visualization tools. To get there, you want to go to "Releases" from FRED's homepage, navigate to GDP and then you see all of the BEA releases associated with GDP. To get to the quarterly frequency of percent growth in real GDP.
I. Of the main components of GDP as measured from the expenditure side (C, I, G, NX), what are they called in the release?
II. For each of the major components, download their histories going back to 1960 (it goes further, but there were some measurement issues early on). For each, what is the average growth, standard deviation of growth, skewness of growth and kurtosis of growth. Explain what each means. You probably need to download the data and import it into a spreadsheet for this. To compute growth of a variable, either look at the percent change yearover-year of the "not-seasonally adjusted' version or look quarter-overquarter if it's the "seasonally adjusted" version.