Publications by Christopher Gandrud
Partisan Bias in Fed Inflation Forecasts?
Following on from my previous post about US Federal Reserve inflation forecast errors, I decided to put together a descriptive graph to see if there might be a partisan bias to these forecast erros. Also, given all of the work in the political economy on political business cycles, I wanted to see if forecast errors changed around ele...
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Japan Stagnation Myth?
I came across this piece on The Atlantic website by Eamonn Fingleton arguing that Japan’s two decade long stagnation is largely a myth. I’m not willing, just yet, to completely go along with his thesis that this myth has been stoked by the Japanese Government to ease political pressure on their export-oriented economic model. (It...
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Update to Partisan Bias in Fed Inflation Forecasts
Since I’m in the depths of PhD thesis revisions I haven’t had much time to do much other than update previous posts (see my Stata Country Standardizer Update).Here is an update of an earlier post about possible partisan biases in US Federal Reserve staff inflation forecasts (these influence Federal Open Market Committee meetings w...
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OpenCPU, R in the Cloud
I ran across OpenCPU today. If you have any intest in R and reproducible research this is definitely worth checking out. Also, it looks like I might want to explore the potential of embedding functions in websites. Hm . . . . Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Christopher Ga...
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How-to Extract Text From Multiple Websites with R
I have been meaning to post this slideshow for awhile now. It gives a brief introduction to using R for scraping text from multiple websites. It includes some basic debugging, because R sometimes misses a website.Just click the arrows to change the slides. Enjoy! Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and ...
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Disproportionality Data
So I was hunting around for some data on disproportional electoral outcomes (when the proportion of voters cast for political parties is not close to the proportion of legislative seats that they win).Michael Gallagher keeps an updated version of his Least Squares (or Gallagher) Index of electoral disproportionality on his website, ho...
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Graphing Predicted Legislative Violence with Zelig & ggplot2
In my previous post I briefly mentioned an early draft of a working paper (HERE) I’ve written that looks into the possible causes of violence between legislators (like the violence shown in this picture from the Turkish Parliament). From The GuardianIn this post I’m going to briefly discuss how I used Zelig‘s rare events log...
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Dynamic Content with RStudio, Markdown, and Marked.
As Markus Gesmann recently pointed out, the new version of RStudio (0.96) has some really nice features for creating dynamic reports with Yihui Xie’s knitr. You can integrate not just R and LaTeX, but also R and Markdown (as well as some other formats). If you haven’t used Markdown before, it’s basically a really simplified syntax for writ...
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Aspirational & Useful: deck.rb with RStudio/knitr & Go2Shell
There has been some interest in the recent release of RStudio 0.96 and especially the ability to use combine its knitr Markdown functionality with Pandoc to integrate R and a variety of different documents types. I just wanted to add two quick things (one mostly aspirational, the other useful) Aspirational: Markdown/Ruby/deck.js I am currently u...
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knitr, Slideshows, and Dropbox
I just noticed that Markus Gesmann has a nice post on using RStudio, knitr, Pandoc, and Slidy to create slideshows. After my recent attempt to use deck.rb to turn a Markdown/knitr file into a deck.js presentation I caved in and also decided to go with Pandoc and Slidy. For me, Slidy produced the cleanest slides of the three formats that Pandoc su...
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