Miscellaneous
Some of my own code:
Matlab tools used to aggregate or decompose the chain-type quantity indices, which are often used by the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) tables of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA): Chain_Aggregation.m and Chain_Subtraction.m.
Stata code used to convert the alpha-3 (3-letter) country codes (used in, for instance, the Penn World Table) into the alpha-2 (2-letter) country codes (used in, for instance, the ORBIS data): countrycode.m.
Media coverage:
Productivity, not trade, explains shift from manufacturing to services, for the Straits Times, Dec 21, 2018.
Some of my favourite quotes:
"... history, statistics, and 'theory'... together make up what we shall call Economic Analysis. Of these fundamental fields, economic history is by far the most important... if, starting my work in economics afresh, I were told that I could study only one of the three but could have my choice, it would be economic history that I should choose." (Joseph A. Schumpeter, Chapter 2, History of Economic Analysis)
"Once one starts to think about [economic growth], it is hard to think about anything else. This is what we need a theory of economic development for." (Robert E. Lucas, Jr., 1988 JME)
"Advances in the natural sciences are discoveries of ways to compress data concerning the natural world...with minimal loss of information... Economics aims to accomplish the same sort of thing in relation to data on the economy, but is less successful." (Christopher A. Sims, 1996 JEP)
"... all models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful." "... the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad." (Gregory Box, various writings, see Wiki)
Family photo:
