I read a series of articles related to the goings of the UK housing market, the likely effects of the new Help To Buy scheme, the 10% increase in mean London house price over the last year, and employment statistics. I failed to reproduce some numbers cited in the economist (below). ... [Read more...]

Inspired by the Institute of Fiscal Studies' "Where do you fit in" application, where people can find out their position in the UK's income distribution, I wanted to find out how the picture in London looks like. Quite different. If you are in a very high percentile nationwide, high incomes ... [Read more...]

I just pushed the most recent version of the PSID panel data builder introduced a little while ago. Got some user feedback and made some improvements. The package is hosted on github.News:I added a reproducible example using artificial data which you c... [Read more...]

I got intrigued by the numbers presented in this news article talking about the re-trial in the Amanda Knox case. The defendants, accused and initially convicted of murder, were acquitted in the appeal's instance when the judge ruled that the forensic evidence was insufficiently conclusive. The appeals judge ignored the ... [Read more...]

Economists frequently use public datasets. One frequently used dataset is the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, short PSID, maintained by the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan.I'm introducing psidR, which is a small helper packag... [Read more...]

File under: getting data.Oh the irony. Exactly one day after I start to read the great book on Open Government by O'Reilly media (which they released in tribute to Aaron Schwartz), I come in need of time series data on unemployment rates in the United ... [Read more...]

Update 2: Put up a second graph showing debt of Spain.Update: I just read the most recent article of Stiglitz. I mostly agree. However, I'm not quite sure what he means when he says thatSpain and Ireland had fiscal surpluses and low debt/GDP ratios bef... [Read more...]

Some time ago I got inspired by a post on r-bloggers.com, showing the housing bubble in several US cities, nicely done with ggplot. I extended this to incorporate two measures of problems in the consumer credit markets: the percentage of people with a ... [Read more...]

Code Readability is maybe the most important part of producing reproducible research. If it's impossible (i.e. very costly) for somebody else to read/understand the computer code that underlies your results, then the odds are that they will never be... [Read more...]

The Deferred Acceptance Algorithm (DAA) goes back to Gale and Shapley (1962). They introduce a rather simple algorithm that finds a stable matching for example for college admissions or in a marriage market. In a marriage market where M men have prefer... [Read more...]

As a first step to produce some useable code for spline interpolation/approximation in R, I set out to first do polynomial interpolation to see how I get along. It's not that there is no spline interpolation software for R, but I find it a bit limited. splinefun, for example, ... [Read more...]

I have data on user access to a website. This log file (helpdesk log.csv) just contains the date of access, and how many accesses were counted. It would look like this:Date hits13-07-2011 214-07-2011 116-07-2011 317-07-2011 4...As you can see, for day... [Read more...]