Data

A good economics paper comes from an interesting (not just cute) question met with appropriate design. The difficulty is finding data for your design; data is usually the binding constraint. I keep a list of datasets here which I peruse when I'm looking at new projects.

Moreover a lot of novel data sets can be petitioned from state and federal agencies. Raj Chetty presented at the NBER this piece about the increasing importance of administrative datasets in economic research.

Open Oil has a great guide to where data on oil bidding, extraction, and transport can be found. The guide is loaded below in case it is eventually taken down.

Business Longitudinal Data: very cool data set that is a longitudinal census of all businesses. You can either get it through an RDC or get synthetic (real data perturbed with noise) here (http://www.census.gov/ces/dataproducts/datasets/lbd.html) and then submit the do files to the census who will then execute your dofiles on the full original data. Great for reduced-form industrial organization and public economics.

Lots of great data at the Census: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rod-little/decennial-census_b_3046611.html

Scandinavian Super Data: The Danish data has some information here: http://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/dokumentation/Declarations/integrated-database-for-labour-market-research--ida-.aspx

Hurricane and natural disaster data: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/Data_Storm.html, http://webra.cas.sc.edu/hvriapps/sheldus_setup/sheldus_results.aspx, http://www.fema.gov/disaster/1871. Natural disasters and weather often make valuable instruments because it is at least clear that the outcome variable did not cause the weather shock.

US Cross Section: This data includes teacher turnover, pension generosity, starting salary, salary growth, and demographic controls for each state. Data is .dta file. Recreate my table with this .do file.

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