Posts

Making LaTeX tables that look nice (2024 update)

R
latex
I haven’t been very good at updating the blog recently,1 but it feels like as good a time as any for an update on how to make basic but nice-looking LaTeX tables with…
Apr 6, 2024
Patrick Baylis

Welcome to Quarto

writing
coding
It’s Quarto’s world, we’re all just living in it
Dec 11, 2022
Patrick Baylis

 

A catalog of datasets for environmental economics

data
With the help of Keith Kirchner, one of our all-star graduate students, I’ve started to put together a catalog of datasets relevant to environmental economics research. I…
May 13, 2022
Patrick Baylis

 

Productivity and the work habits that work (for me)

productivity
(Original post April 10, 2021, updated February 9, 2022. This blog post is discussed on the excellent Hidden Curriculum podcast with Alex Hollingsworth and Sebastian…
Feb 9, 2022

Pop-weighted averages from rasters

programming
Updated February 10, 2022 to incorporate prism package.
Aug 15, 2021

Making better tables

analysis
I now have an updated version of this post. You can find it here.
May 30, 2021

Partial predictions

coding
In climate economics and in other settings, we often would like to estimate a response function, or the outcome as a function of some covariate, i.e., y=f(T). Most of…
Jan 22, 2021

 

How I’m remote teaching a big class this fall

teaching
I start teaching remotely in two weeks. Helping 140 students spread across the world (so many timezones!) learn about environmental economics is a daunting task.…
Aug 20, 2020
Patrick Baylis

Overlaying a raster and shapefile

R
I’m often overlaying rasters with shapefiles in order to get, for example, the average weather for Indonesia. I’ve found that it’s immensely important that I map my data when…
Jul 3, 2020
Patrick Baylis

Notes on sourdough

food
And now for something completely different… sourdough! I first began baking as an escape from grad school ennui. Since then, and especially in last couple months, it’s been…
Apr 12, 2020
Patrick Baylis

How to plot a specification curve

programming
Like many researchers, I often want to plot a range of coefficient estimates to figure out if the results I’m finding are robust to other sensible specification and…
Feb 28, 2020
Patrick Baylis

 

Scoring texts for the presence of phrases

programming
In my text analysis work, I frequently score texts for the presence or absence of various ``keywords’’. Because I work with some large corpora (collections of texts), for…
Dec 5, 2019
Patrick Baylis

Generating regression tables in R

I often need to document the statistical results I estimate in table format. I have tried many, many things over the years, and none of my solutions are perfect, including…
Nov 25, 2019

 

FD vs FE and new tidyr commands

econometrics
For two periods, first differences is numerically equivalent to a fixed effect model. The following code reproduces that result, using the (new) pivot_longer and pivot_wider …
Nov 5, 2019
Patrick Baylis

 

Making regressions purrr

programming
I often need to run multiple sets of regressions on the same or similar datasets. This is usually for some set of robustness checks, either to help me better understand the…
Jun 11, 2019
Patrick Baylis

 

A list of gists

programming
I’ve been saving a lot of code snippets here. To keep things organized, I’m going to keep them in a single page instead.
May 16, 2019
Patrick Baylis

 

Things I forget: install git lfs and initialize in repo

programming
git lfs is great for including (fairly) large files in git repositories. Since the entire history of files is saved, it prevents large files from blowing up the repo. I’m…
Nov 4, 2018

Automatically size beamer images and tables

writing
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” - Winston Churchill (although apparently he was quoting someone else)
Oct 11, 2018

 

Things I forget: readr shortcuts

programming
readr is a the swiss-army knife of data ingestion: it’s my tool of choice for reading in text data in R, not least because I’m spending more time using the tidyverse these…
Oct 8, 2018

 

Debugging in R, RStudio

programming
Debugging can be a challenge in RStudio. One of my main frustrations is that once you execute the Run command on a selection of code (i.e., running it in interactive mode)…
Sep 11, 2018
Patrick Baylis

 

Things I forget: tmux for headless SSH use

productivity
How to run something through SSH that takes a long time without having to stay logged in:
Sep 11, 2018

 

Nominatim for offline geocoding

I needed to geocode around 20 million addresses. Normally I could just pay geocod.io to do this for me, but because of the contractual confidentiality requirements around…
Aug 28, 2018

Climate Projection Sandbox

econometrics
Many climate-society papers project the impacts of predicted climate change on the outcome of interest (guilty!). This post include code to conduct this kind of “climate…
May 20, 2018
Patrick Baylis

 

Linear combinations of coefficients in R

coding
I still use a version of this occasionally, but the various marginal effects package – specifically `marignaleffects’ seem to replicate most of the functionality I need…
Apr 12, 2018

R performance tests

programming
Update (July 2020): These tests are quite dated at this point, YMMV. Software changes quickly!
Feb 3, 2017
Patrick Baylis
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