Patrick Baylis - 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…

Welcome to Quarto

writing

coding

It’s Quarto’s world, we’re all just living in it

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…

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…

Pop-weighted averages from rasters

programming

Updated February 10, 2022 to incorporate prism package.

Making better tables

analysis

I now have an updated version of this post. You can find it here.

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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.

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…

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)

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…

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)…

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:

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…

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…

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…

R performance tests

programming

Update (July 2020): These tests are quite dated at this point, YMMV. Software changes quickly!

Estimating high dimensional fixed effects models in Julia

programming

Update (December 2022): Julia has changed quite a bit since I originally wrote this. FixedEffectsModels.jl still existed when I last checked in 2018, but it often gave me…

Yesterday’s Maximum Temperature is… Today’s Maximum Temperature?

data

This was also posted on G-Feed.

How to save a stream of tweets

data

Update (July 2020): I no longer use this process, since now I save the raw tweets as JSONs and convert to CSVs for processing later. This takes up more hard drive space, but…

Fast Zonal Statistics

econometrics

Update (July 2020): There are now other R options that are faster. For example exactextractr, velox, and fasterize, among many others. I no longer resort to Python for these…

Conley standard errors and high dimensional fixed effects

econometrics

Update (April 2022): I’ve left this post up for posterity, but, full disclosure, the “solution” I offer below the break isn’t much of a solution at all. These days, when I…

Productivity and organization notes

productivity

December 2022: I’ve left this post up for posterity, but I habitually reinvent my work process every six months or soo, so at this point these notes are about well out of…