In my recent research I have worked on understanding the key correlates of Brexit. This paper is joint work with my co-authors Sascha Becker and Dennis Novy and has now been published in Economic Policy. After having gone through the peer-review process, I am very happy to share the data ... [Read more...]

As the reality of a hung parliament starts to sink in, economists, political scientists and commentators will begin their usual routine of “post mortem” analysis of the surprise result of the UK 2017 general election. My co-authors Sascha Becker and Dennis Novy have done a similar exercise studying the EU Referendum ... [Read more...]

The Yemeni civil war has received very little attention despite the growing humanitarian disaster. There is a lack of reliable figures on the extent of the human suffering in Yemen. The few data that is available suggests that it is immense. According to the UN, from March 2015 to August 2016, over 10,000 ... [Read more...]

Weak institutions and natural resource abundance are a recipe for civil conflict and the overexploitation of natural resources.  In our forthcoming paper with the title “Take what you can: property rights, contestability and conflict”, Samuel Marden and I present evidence from Brazil indicating that insecure property rights are a major ... [Read more...]

On the evening of the polling day, some parts of London and southern England were hit by very bad weather, while other areas experienced nice weather with high temperatures and sunshine. The weather could have affected the Brexit vote by affecting Turnout or by affecting Voting Intentions. To cut a ... [Read more...]

Darin Christensen and Thiemo Fetzer tl;dr: Fast computation of standard errors that allows for serial and spatial auto-correlation. Economists and political scientists often employ panel data that track units (e.g., firms or villages) over time. When estimating regression models using such data, we often need to be concerned ... [Read more...]

I have worked on big data in my work with QuBit in London. In my research I increasingly find the tools I learnt there to be extremely useful. The keywords are smart data management for big data, such as hadoop and hive for querying just the right set of data ... [Read more...]

Quite a few people emailed me regarding my post on Econ Job Market. This post is about how you can use very basic and simple R tools to help you in sorting through the Job Openings for Economists list from the American Economic Association.This definitely helped me in developing ... [Read more...]

I wanted to describe a little helper I am using to help refine the places I want to apply at since I am going to be on the Economics Job Market this year. The two main websites were job openings are advertised are: EconJobMarket Job Openings for Economists Now JOE ... [Read more...]

I have been working quite a lot with climate and weather data, to study the impact of rainfall shocks on violence in India and how this relationship changed, after the social insurance scheme NREGA was introduced. In my context, it becomes particularly relevant to adjust for spatial correlation if you ... [Read more...]

I have been working on a visualisation to highlight the results from my paper Fracking Growth, to highlight the local economic impact of the recent oil and gas boom in the US.  There are two key insights. First, there are strong spillover effects from the oil and gas sector. I ... [Read more...]

My research Fracking Growth investigates the localised impacts of the current oil and gas production boom in the US. The boom is triggered by extraction of oil and gas deposits, that were previously not possible to exploit. The shale deposits have become technologically recoverable due to a combination of horizontal ... [Read more...]

For my paper on the impact of social insurance on the dynamics of conflict in India, I use some new remote sensed weather data. The data comes from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellites. The satellite carries a set of five instruments, and is essentially a rainfall radar located ... [Read more...]

I really enjoyed Treb Allen‘s tutorial on deploying a Shiny server on an Amazon Cloud Instance. I used this approach for my shiny app that is a map highlighting the economic impact of the recent shale oil and gas boom on the places where the actual extraction happens. The ... [Read more...]

In my paper on the impact of the shale oil and gas boom in the US, I run various instrumental variables specifications. For these, it is nice to stack the regression results one on the other – in particular, to have one row for the IV results, one row for the ... [Read more...]

Starting last summer I worked on a short project that set out to estimate the potential costs of externalities due to unconventional shale gas production in the Marcellus shale on local house prices using a dataset of roughly 150,000 recently sold houses in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I stopped working ... [Read more...]

In my paper on the impact of the recent fracking boom on local economic outcomes, I am estimating models with multiple fixed effects. These fixed effects are useful, because they take out, e.g. industry specific heterogeneity at the county level - or state specific time shocks. The models can ... [Read more...]

For my research on the effect of power outages on fertility , we study a period of extensive power rationing that lasted for almost a whole year and affected most of Latin America, but in particular, it affected Colombia. The key difficult was to determine which areas were exposed to the ... [Read more...]

I have been having some issues generating spatial unions and intersections using the rgeos package. The package is extremely powerful, as it serves as an R interface to the powerful GEOS engine. However, when working with shapefiles or polygons, quite often you will come across a whole range of errors, ... [Read more...]

Thanks to the attention my paper on the cost of Somali piracy has received, a lot of people have approached me to ask how I computed the maritime routes. It is not a very difficult task using R. The key ingredient is a map of the world, that can be ... [Read more...]