Blog Posts

Data science maturity and the cloud

code

python

rstats

data science

cloud

work chat

public sector

Data science has enormous…

The public sector could be better at managing knowledge ‘data’: what can we do?

economics

productivity

public sector

Who thinks the public sector is good enough at managing its stock of knowledge; the ideas, strategies, processes, and decisions that go into the efficient provision of…

Why you shouldn’t code on your work laptop

code

open-source

cloud

data science

work chat

“Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft” goes an old saying. Actually, it was probably first said in the 1980s in reference to IBM (School Microcomputing Bulletin 1983), but the meaning remains the same: as the Chief Technology Officer, or similar, you’re not going to get in trouble for buying the boring old thing that everyone else is…

In praise of APIs (application programming interfaces)

code

data

In this blog, I look at some of reasons why APIs are such a great way to share data.

TIL: How to break RSS feeds

blogging

code

writing

TIL

Note: this is the first post under a new tag called TIL or “today…

Welcome To The New Home for My Blog

news

This is the first post on a brand new blog site: welcome!

Visual Studio Code on the Cloud

code

research

cloud

python

rstats

Visual Studio Code is incredibly powerful, whether it’s for writing markdown, writing quarto (.qmd) files, getting syntax highlighting and peerless…

Writing a Research Blog Post

blogging

research

writing

In this post, you will find hints and tips for writing impactful blog posts that summarise research or analysis. This is a cross-post with a new page on Coding for Economists title…

Setting up R in Visual Studio Code

code

rstats

Three ways to blog with code

code

blogging

Typically, what I want to do when I create a blog post is to…

10 less well-known Python packages

code

open-source

python

(Remember that to use these, you will need to run pip install packagename on the command line.)

Get organised

code

data

research

This monster blog post is going to discuss how to organise your a data science project or research project: data…

Specification curve analysis

code

research

open-source

econometrics

Since publishing this post, I have written the specification_curve package for Python. specification_curve automates some aspects of specification curve analysis, namely running multiple regressions and…

Putting women scientists onto Wikipedia

outreach

code

data

In a previous post, I shared links about the predictors for not participating in higher education, and about how it is difficult to reach…

Who is not participating in Higher Education?

outreach

data

Given my work in both economics and Science, Technology, Engineering, and…

Why the latest, most exciting thing in machine learning is… game theory

research

machine-learning

And when I say latest, this particular method was invented in 1953.

Econometrics in Python Part IV - Running many regressions alongside pandas

code

econometrics

python

The fourth in the series of posts covering econometrics in Python. This time: automating the boring business of running multiple regressions on columns in a pandas dataframe.

Econometrics in Python part III - Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects using random forests

code

econometrics

machine-learning

python

The third in a series of posts covering econometrics in Python. Here I look at ‘causal forests’.

Econometrics in Python Part II - Fixed effects

code

econometrics

python

In this second in a series on econometrics in Python, I’ll look at how to implement fixed effects.

Econometrics in Python part I - Double machine learning

code

econometrics

python

The idea is that this will be the first in a series of posts covering econometrics in Python.

Making a publication quality plot with Python (and latex)

research

visualisation

code

python

I now recommend the style file below for quick…

The ONS API

data

code

python

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) produces most of the macroeconomic statistics for the UK. I was delighted to discover recently that they had been working on an API.

A better narrative on narratives

research

Pigou, Keynes and Shiller have all recognised the importance of narratives and sentiment for the economy. But we don’t know too much about how narratives spread. One of the…