Publications by Economics and R - R posts
Detailed Current Data on the Economic Impact of Covid-19
I was very impressed when watching Raj Chetty’s video presentation in the AEA panel “The Economic Impact and Policy Response to the Pandemic: What Happened in 2020 and What is Ahead?”. He is part of a group (Chetty, Friedman, Hendren, Stepner, and the OI Team) that convinced several private sector companies to make publicly available import...
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Waiving Covid-19 Vaccine Patents? I don’t think its a good idea…
Obviously, it seems absolutely essential to put a lot of resources into ramping up world-wide vaccine production with the goal to ensure that quickly almost everybody in the world has the chance to become vaccinated. But is a waiver of patents for Covid-19 vaccines, as the US government recently supported a good step towards this direction? In th...
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xglue: Extended string interpolation for customized Latex tables and more.
I wrote my new R package xglue because for a recent working paper, we needed to generate several customized Latex tables, like the following excerpt: While all the data can be easily merged into a data frame in R, creating this fairly customized Latex table from a reproducible workflow seemed less straightforward. For example, building the table...
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RTutor: Exploring Economic Impacts of COVID-19
An earlier post described the impressive collection of US data that Chetty et al. made available to illuminate the economic impacts of Covid and accompanying policy measures. As part of her Master thesis at Ulm university Alexandra Aehle has created a very nice RTutor problem set that allows you to replicate key insights of the data base the rela...
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RTutor: Insurance and the Church
Finally an RTutor problem set about insurance! It is about time given that Ulm University is ranked worldwide as the 2nd best non-business school for research in Risk, Management and Insurance and Actuarial Sciences: Source: The UNL Global Research Rankings of Actuarial Science and Risk Management & Insurance I know that is some blatant adverti...
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Will the next German parliament have a gigantic size? A law and coding challenge…
On Sunday (26th of September), we will have the main parliamentary elections in Germany. The deepl translation of the election law states: §1 (1) Subject to the deviations resulting from this Act, the German Bundestag shall consist of 598 Members of Parliament. […]” Well, the “deviations” led in the previous elections to a Bundestag wi...
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Post election update: Will the German parliament have a gigantic size?
This is just a short update to my previous post. Bundestag elections are over and according to the preliminary official results the new Bundestag will have 735 members. That’s 32 more than the previous 703 members, but at least far from 841 members predicted in my previous post that was based on last week’s forecast data. The main reason is t...
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RTutor: Does Bank Lending Increase Before Elections?
Assume you are an incumbent local politician that can exert certain control on your local public savings bank. Would you try to increase lending before local elections to polish economic performance? In their great article Electoral Cycles in Savings Bank Lending (JEEA, 2017) Florian Englmaier and Till Stowasser explore the degree of such elector...
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Visually assessing the parallel trends assumption for DID estimation with control variables
Difference-in-Difference (DID) estimation is a very intuitive and popular approach to estimate causal effects (see here for my take on teaching it). If you know about DID and want to directly know how to create a plot to assess the parallel trends assumption if we have additional control variables click here. Otherwise, we proceed step-by-step. D...
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RTutor: What explains the employment drop in the great recession 2007-2009?
During the financial crisis and great recession from 2007 to 2009 the US lost 8.6 million jobs. We know that a lot of things happened in the crisis, like a crisis of trust in the financial system including the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Another related crucial aspect was a massive drop in house prices. Highly indebted home owners lost a huge am...
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