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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

Personally, I think it was a great decision of the FDA to make the material of their important meeting for the Emergency Use Authorization of the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine publicly available. In particular, they published the whole meeting as a YouTube v... [Read more...]

Currently, I am teaching a new course Empirical Economics with R. The RTutor problem set for the chapter on Difference-in-Difference estimation uses the great package lfe. I consider it an essential package to convince Stata users (still most empirical... [Read more...]

In their press release AstraZeneca provide the following information about an interim analysis of their vaccine trial: One dosing regimen (first a half dose and at least a month later a full dose) with 2741 participants showed 90% efficacy ... [Read more...]

This is my 4th post about Biontech/Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial. If you are missing background, please first look at my 2nd post and 3rd post. Biontech/Pfizer originally planed to analyze the vaccine efficacy at 5 stages: after 32, 62, 92, 120 and ... [Read more...]

Here is one more post about Biontech/Pfizer’s vaccine trial. That is because my previous two posts (here and here) have so far ignored one interesting topic: How do Biontech/Pfizer statistically account for interim analyses? Studying this topic gives u... [Read more...]

Let’s take again a look at Biontech / Pfizers vaccine candiate for which a press release stated more than 90% efficacy. As noted in my previous post Biontech/Pfizer actually use a Bayesian approach to assess the efficacy of their vaccine candiate. In ... [Read more...]

Probably, many of you have read the positive news from the Biontech/Pfizer press release from November 9th: “Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infec... [Read more...]

Competition authorities regularly decide (and often defend in legal courts) whether to allow or forbid a merger, what fines to impose for illegal collusion, whether to restrict certain business practices of firms that have achieved a dominant position,... [Read more...]

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An exciting, quite new branch of econometrics studies how machine learning techniques can be adapted to consistently estimate causal effects. For example, the widely cited article by Belloni, Chernozhukov and Hansen (2014) introduces a post double sele... [Read more...]

My course Market Analysis with Econometrics and Machine Learning uses a lot of RTutor problem sets where students can solve interactive exercises with automatic hints and checks of their solutions. One can design RTutor problem sets to be solved in a ... [Read more...]

Econometrics does not cease to surprise me. I just now realized an interesting feature of the omitted variable bias. Consider the following model: Assume we want to estimate the causal effect beta of x on y. However, we have an unobserved confound... [Read more...]

Probably many of us would be more inclined to watch a particular movie in cinema if some friends or colleagues have already seen it and talk about it (at least if it is a decent movie). Duncan Sheppard Gilchrist and Emily Glassberg Sands quantify such... [Read more...]

So far, my main source of information about the US justice system have been tv shows like Suits, or The Good Wife. They suggest that hiring yourself a good lawyer can be quite expensive but may have a big impact on the verdict. But that are tv shows. W... [Read more...]

Consider a regression model with the following causal structure: The variable x1 affects y directly and also indirectly via x2. The following R code implements the model and simulates a corresponding data set. set.seed(1) n = 10000 beta1 = 1; bet... [Read more...]

Almost a year is now gone since I posted my last update about my shiny-powered search app. It allows to search among currently more than 5000 economic articles that have an accessible data and code supplement: https://ejd.econ.mathematik.uni-ulm.de The main data for my app can be downloaded ... [Read more...]

In this Corona semester, I have created at Ulm University a new online course Market Analysis with Econometrics and Machine Learning. I put the course material on this Github repository but you can work through most of the course directly online. Shin... [Read more...]

One way by which carbon pricing can reduce CO2 emmissions is by shifting electricity production from coal power plants to natural gas plants. A combined cycle gas turbine emits roughly only half as much CO2 per MWh produced electricity than a coal powe... [Read more...]