Publications by Economics and R - R posts
How many Covid cases and deaths did UK’s fast vaccine authorization prevent?
The UK approved on December 2nd, as first country in the world, the emergency use authorization (EUA) of Biontech/Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccination. A few days later on December 8th, the first NHS patient became vaccinated. Neither the European Union nor any of its member states chose an EUA but rather opted to wait for the decision on a more exten...
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Finding Economic Articles with Data and Specific Empirical Methods
Do you want to find reproducible empirical economic studies that use a particular method or concept, like random forests or instrumental variable estimation? This becomes now even easier with my freshly updated shiny-powered app “Find Economic Articles with Data”: https://ejd.econ.mathematik.uni-ulm.de The app allows to search among more than...
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Empirical Economics with R (Part A): The wine formula and machine learning
This semester I teach a new course: Empirical Economics with R. All material is online available, including video lectures with quizzes and interactive RTutor problem sets, which are perhaps the most important part of the course. One goal when designing the course was to motivate most concepts with one or two main applications. The main applicati...
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Empirical Economics with R (Part B): Confounders, Proxies and Sources of Exogenous Variations
[This is a duplicate of the previous post, which was not detected by all blog aggregators.] Chapter 3 of my course Empirical Economics with R mainly dives into the difficulties of estimating causal effects. (See the previous post for an overview of the earlier chapters dealing with prediction.) One important point I emphasize in this chapter with...
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Estimating the probability that a vaccinated person still infects others with Covid-19
The estimated vaccine efficacies from the phase III clinical trials provide good information of how strongly a Covid-19 vaccine reduces the probability of a symptomatic Covid-19 infection in the vaccinated individual, e. g. 95% for the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine. However, the probability that a vaccinated person still becomes infected without sympto...
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Empirical Economics with R (Part C): Difference-in-Differences and Search Engine Marketing
Chapter 4 of my course Empirical Economics with R covers a popular strategy to estimate causal effects: difference-in-differences estimation. Inspired by Matt Taddy’s textbook example, the main application is to estimate the causal effects of search engine marketing on revenues based on an experiment conducted by eBay and studied by Blake, Nosk...
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Shiny without Shiny: RTutor in RStudio’s new Visual Markdown Mode
RStudio version 1.4 brought many great enhancements. My favorite feature is the new visual markdown editing mode. This allows to solve interactive RTutor problem sets with a shiny look directly in the RStudio editor. Here is a screenshot: The example RTutor problem set VisualMode.Rmd is shown in the left pane. It is opened in the visual markdown...
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EU Vaccine Procurement and a Public Goods Dilemma
Many EU citizens (including me) are frustrated that due to lower supply, vaccinations in EU countries currently proceed substantially slower than in the US or the UK. In this post I make some simple economic arguments (illustrated with R) for how the common approach of the EU members might have been improved by mitigating a public goods dilemma t...
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Empirical Economics with R (Part D): Instrumental Variable Estimation and Potential Outcomes
Chapter 5 of my course Empirical Economics with R covers instrumental variable (IV) estimation. While being one of the most popular methods in academic economic papers for estimating causal effects (see e.g. the statistics here), I was not sure whether to introduce IV estimation in this Bachelor level course. My hesitation was due to the fact tha...
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SQLite is great for R and Shiny. The dbmisc package may help a bit.
Over the years I have written several Shiny apps that rely on SQLite databases. One example is my shiny app to find reproducible economic articles with data supplement: https://ejd.econ.mathematik.uni-ulm.de. The underlying data is stored in a SQLite database and I regularly run some scrapping code that inserts new content. SQLite is also super h...
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