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 States. Inspired by the book, I'm all over the open government initiative at www.data.gov. In fact, unemployment by state is quickly found:
https://explore.data.gov/Labor-Force-Employment-and-Earnings/Local-Area-Unemployment-Statistics/4mrq-gjni
What's wrong?
Well, the button "download csv" takes me to the BLS' website, where I'm kindly informed that I need to install Java 7, which then in turn the Java site informs me that this is not a good idea for several reasons to install on my mac. Great.
Did I not just want a csv? Java what?
Way to go till Open Government. I ended up doing the work myself. Go and get your unemployment rates by state from 1981-2011 on my github. (contains raw data and RData)
I looked around a lot and couldn't find any other data source. let me know if there is one out there I might have missed.
Oct
20
A Nation of Real Estate Agents
UPDATE: Following up on a comment below, I used another data source, ONS JOBS02 for the labor market statistics. I report the findings below.
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). This post talks about this.
It all starts with this blog post on the economist:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2013/09/house-prices
It talks about many things, amongst which employment and housing completions, and how the UK seems likely to be embarking on another round of debt-fueled growth.
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). This post talks about this.
It all starts with this blog post on the economist:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2013/09/house-prices
It talks about many things, amongst which employment and housing completions, and how the UK seems likely to be embarking on another round of debt-fueled growth.
Jun
15
Pizza Dough for 14 people
For loss of a better place, I'll store my recipe for homemade pizza dough here. This will make dough for 14 people.
2kg strong white flour (no self-raising or other extras) 4 sachets of yeast, 7g each (not the super fast bicarbonate stuff) Salt Sugar Olive Oil Water The main problem is to get the right consistency, i.e. how much water to add. You'll have to do some experiments here.
2kg strong white flour (no self-raising or other extras) 4 sachets of yeast, 7g each (not the super fast bicarbonate stuff) Salt Sugar Olive Oil Water The main problem is to get the right consistency, i.e. how much water to add. You'll have to do some experiments here.
Jun
12
Austrian Army Retreats from UN Mission at Syrian Border
I've got some questions regarding this issue, maybe someone out there has a clue.
The Austrian contingent was 300 out of 1000 soldiers
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/israel-angry-austria-golan-heights.
The Austrian contingent was 300 out of 1000 soldiers
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/israel-angry-austria-golan-heights.
Jun
7
Income Distribution in London
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 of mainly financial sector employees in London make sure that you find yourself a couple of ranks further down.
May
19
Update to PSID panel builder for R: psidR
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 can run by calling 'example(build.panel)'. This means you can try out the package before bothering to download anything and it provides a simple test of the main function.
News:
I added a reproducible example using artificial data which you can run by calling 'example(build.panel)'. This means you can try out the package before bothering to download anything and it provides a simple test of the main function.
Apr
29
Stats in the Court Room Hands on Tutorial
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 forensic scientist's advice to retest a DNA sample, because
"The sum of the two results, both unreliable… cannot give a reliable result," he wrote.
"The sum of the two results, both unreliable… cannot give a reliable result," he wrote.
Apr
18
130 litres of gasoline to produce fertilizer used for 1 acre of corn
I just finished reading the extraordinary book tomorrow's table by P. Ronald and Raoul Adamchak. (I linked to Ronald's blog). In this post I wanted to quickly redo a calculation Adamchak does on page 16, where he explains to his students how much energy is required to produce the fertilizer used to grow one acre of corn using conventional agriculture (as opposed to organic methods).
Apr
14
PSID data set builder for R
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 package for R here which makes constructing panels from the PSID a bit easier.
One potential difficulty with the PSID is to construct a longitudinal dataset, i.e. one where individuals are followed over several survey waves.
I'm introducing psidR, which is a small helper package for R here which makes constructing panels from the PSID a bit easier.
One potential difficulty with the PSID is to construct a longitudinal dataset, i.e. one where individuals are followed over several survey waves.
Mar
6
Transaction Costs when Buying a House in the UK
I was recently asked by a friend whether it's worth to buy a house in the UK. That is, assuming they could put down the money, whether it was worth buying as opposed to renting. Apart from obvious things like the expected length of stay in one place, the interest on mortgages and how prices might develop and so forth, they were interested in particular in the amount of transaction costs they were likely to face: fees, taxes and so forth.
Feb
25
A follow up on Krugman and Italy
So Paul Krugman laments in his post that policy makers across Europe have blindly signed up to the "Austerity only" ticket. He cites some evidence which I find fairly convincing. I just want to raise the point that what he says cannot be used as a critique against the Monti government.
Basically what he's saying is that Monti was installed as a puppet of European creditor nations to make sure that austerity would be imposed and the country's government debt would be continued to be serviced.
Basically what he's saying is that Monti was installed as a puppet of European creditor nations to make sure that austerity would be imposed and the country's government debt would be continued to be serviced.
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