I have started to work with R and STATA together. I like running regressions in STATA, but I do graphs and setting up the dataset in R. R clearly has a strong comparative advantage here compared to STATA. I was writing a function that will give me a (balanced) panel-structure ... [Read more...]

I was a bit annoyed by the error when loading a dataset that contains multi-byte characters. R basically just chokes on them. I have not really understood the intricacies of this, but it was basically just an annoyance and since I did not really use these characters in the strings ... [Read more...]

I gave it another go, trying to get a map that looks a bit nicer. This time, I tried to compute something like a density or intensity in a certain area. On the previous map, this was not visible very well. I used ggplot2 and a bit of R code, ... [Read more...]

I am working on a review paper on microfinance in India and use data from the MIX market. Today, I was amazed by how quick I conjured a map of India with the headquarters of the microfinance institutions that report data to the MIX market depicted on that map. Ideally, ... [Read more...]

Now this is something very geeky, but useful. I had to bind two matrices or vectors together to become a bigger matrix. However, they need not have the same number of rows or even the same row names. The standard cbind() functions require the vectors or matrices to be compatible. ... [Read more...]