Why Doing Economics has embraced R
We’ve been delighted by the attention given to our Doing Economics practical projects for students, which we developed at the same time as Economy, Society and Public Policy, our text for non-specialists. You can use these projects alongside any of our material, but they are equally suitable for any course that teaches quantitative methods. Today we’re releasing Doing Economics projects 2 through 5 as projects that use R, an open-source programming language.
From today you can set projects using R on “Analysing data from experiments”, “Measuring the effect of a sugar tax”, “Measuring wellbeing”, and “Measuring inequality”. Project 1, on climate change, already exists in R, and at the end of October we will be completing the set with all the projects up to 12.
Ralf Becker at The University of Manchester was the driving force behind adding the R versions, based on his experience using R successfully to teach econometrics. His colleague James Lincoln, and Eileen Tipoe at CORE, helped to create them by adapting the Excel tasks.
