Little Projects

I like to make stuff. This page compiles some of the things that I’ve made that aren’t really worth splitting out on their own. A lot of them are just links to Twitter, where I have in the past tended to post the things I make.

On Trends.
A warning about simplistic ways of “adjusting for trend”

Data Visualization Checklist.
A checklist to use whenever you’re preparing a data visualization.

Publication Turnaround times in Economics.
A graph showing turnaround times to publication in economics by looking at NBER publication rates over time.

Statistical Terminology.
A slide on how to interpret the Greek and Latin (English) letters in statistics.

Data Wrangling Videos.
Videos on data wrangling and cleaning in R tidyverse, R data.table, and Python pandas.

How to Construct a Regression.
A flowchart for how to take a bunch of variables and make a regression out of them.

Power Analysis Simulations in Stata.
How to perform a power analysis using simulation in Stata.

Power Analysis Simulations in R.
How to perform a power analysis using simulation in R.

SafeGraph Data Reveals Coronavirus’s Crippling Impact on International Air Travel.
A blog post I helped run numbers on showing how the Coronavirus outbreak affected foot traffic at airports.

Robustness Tests: What, Why, and How.
A guide to how to use and understand the purpose of robustness tests.

Teaching Econometrics with R.
Workshop slides about how R can be used in an econometrics classroom, focusing on data manipulation and getting familiar with the language, targeted at economics faculty who may already be familiar with other statistics packages.

Teaching with Causal Diagrams.
Slides from a workshop about teaching research design, econometrics, and applied economics to undergraduates with causal diagrams.

Teaching ECON 305: Economics, Causality, and Analytics.
Slides from a workshop about teaching ECON 305, a new causality class designed to go before the rest of econometrics.

A Review of “The Case Against Education”.
A review of the Bryan Caplan book “A Case Against Education.”

The Folk Theorem of Statistics.
An overview of what it’s like working as a statistical consultant, and how people tend to view the purpose of statistics.

Strong-Instrument Bias.
A walkthrough of the concept of how instrumental variables estimation can be biased by the process of only performing the analysis if the instrument is strong enough.

Job Market Advice.
A thread on job market advice aimed at those who are going for middle-of-the-road positions rather than R1s.

Why Not R Squared?.
A graph showing why it’s not a great idea to use R squared to pick your model.

Selecting Results on p-values.
A set of graphs showing why it’s not a great idea to selectively report (or use) your results based on statistical significance, and how this means that in low-power situations, a significant result is very likely to be wrong!

Earnings and Debt Burden by Program.
A very preliminary look at how student debt burden and earnings vary by degree type/major.

Important Avocado Information.
What else do you need to know?

Interactive College Scorecard Graph.
Data from the College Scorecard 2016-17 with hover-over information.

Collider demonstration.
A graph showing how bad collider bias can get.

Numbers in Pop Music.
Ever wonder what kinds of numbers the lyrics of pop music contain?

Non-English Pop Music.
Ever wonder how often non-English language songs make the Billboard Hot 100?

Good Pop Music.
Ever wonder how good pop music is?

US Presidential Birth Year over Time.
We sure get a lotta old guys these days.

Money In / Money Out for Colleges.
Where does the money come from, and where does it go?

Lots of TV Shows.
Some Econ 201 thinking about why there are so many darn TV shows these days.

Power Analysis for Subsample Treatment.
A graph displaying statistical power for a test in which only a subsample responds to treatment.

The Boss Regression.
In reference to a legendary StackExchange post, what does it actually mean if you sort x and y independently before regressing one on the other?

Movie Themes and Actors.
Graphs of actor names and the kinds of terms that pop up in different movie genres.

Googlin’ for Garbage.
When you Google nonsense, what sites pop up?

EconTwitter Sentiment Analysis.
How happy is EconTwitter? And is happiness related to instructor effectiveness? (no)

Economist Skills.
What should an economics grad student spend their time figuring out how to do? Other than, like, research and stuff.