By Joachim Gassen (Humboldt University Berlin, TRR 266 “Accounting for Transparency”) and David Veenman (University of Amsterdam) “To reduce the impact of outliers on our findings, we winsorize the dependent and independent variables at the top and...

I am an applied economist and economists love Stata. Every time I work with somebody who uses Stata on panel models with fixed effects and clustered standard errors I am mildly confused by Stata’s ‘reghdfe’ function producing standard errors that...

I recently included the new Our World in Data data on Covid-19 hospitalizations and the vaccination progress around the world in the {tidycovid19} package. What was meant to be a short info post for package users turned into a mini case on “outlie...

LEGO Mosaics have been around for a while and there is the wonderful {bricksr} package by Ryan Timpe that makes it easy to construct them based on bitmap images. So, when I ran across the relatively new LEGO Art theme sets, I was instantly hooked. T...

The idea OK. We are at home. Again. Given that large parts of Europe and the U.S. are currently experiencing a second large wave of Covid-19 cases and that most European jurisdictions have reacted with more or less rigorous lockdown regulatio...

A recent update to the {tidycovid19} package brings data on testing, alternative case data, some regional data and proper data documentation. Using all this, you can use the package to explore the associations of (the lifting of) governmental measures, citizen behavior and the Covid-19 spread. Installation The Package is hosted ...

As the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting more and more countries around the globe, I included additional visualizations options into the {tidycovid19} package so that it becomes easier to compare the spread of the virus across countries. Also, I use this post to take a quick look on some countries that ...

Yesterday, I came across the Google “COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports“. In these reports, Google provides some statistics about changes in mobility patterns across geographic regions and time. The data seem to be very interesting to assess the extent of how much governmental interventions and social incentives have affected our day-to-day ...

Setting up the stage Everybody seems to be starring at plots outlining the spread of the pandemic these days. One thing that caught my interest is how relative small differences in design choices can influence the message that a visual displays. Using the ‘Financial Times Plots’ graphs developed by John ...

Exploring and Benchmarking Oxford Government Response Data Assessing the impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions on the spread of Covid-19 requires data on Governmental measures. Luckily, the Assessment Capacities Project (ACAPS) and the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker both provide such data. In this blog post, I explore the new data provided ...

I have decided that the world needs another Covid-19 related R package. Not sure whether you agree, but the new package facilitates the direct download of various Covid-19 related data (including data on governmental measures) directly from authoritative sources. It also provides a flexible function and accompanying shiny app to ...

Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist so I will abstain from analyzing the spread of the disease or estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions. As an applied economist, however, I study the economic effects of regulatory interventions, and thus feel confident to make some general remarks about why it is ...

Just hours after my old blog post about tidying Johns Hopkins CSSE Covid-19 data the team has changed their time-series table data structure. The data of the old post is still available but won’t be updated. This new blog post is based on the new times-series data structure. Currently, ...

My guess is that by now everybody knows that the public Github repository maintained by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering has developed to a standard resource for individuals interested in analyzing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. There are alternative resources and blog articles covering them. Also, ...

Assume that you have some new data that you want to explore. The new CRAN version of the ‘ExPanDaR’ package helps by providing a (customized) R notebook containing all building blocks of an exploratory data analysis with a few clicks. Install the Package and Start ExPanD First, you need to ...

Online appendices detailing the robustness of empirical analyses are paramount but they never let readers explore all reasonable researcher degrees of freedom. Simonsohn, Simmons and Nelson suggest a ‘specification curve’ that allows readers to eyeball how a main coefficient of interest varies across a wide arrange of specifications. I build ...

Last week, we started a new course titled “Statistical Programming and Open Science Methods”. It is being offered under the research program of TRR 266 “Accounting for Transparency” and enables students to conduct data-based research so that...