Why bookdown? LaTeX packages and commands Titlepage, acknowledgements and abstract Include LaTeX files in YAML Summary I finished my Master’s thesis very recently, and I wrote it with R Markdown, and more precisely with the bookdown package. It was really comfortable to do absolutely everything with R: data treatment, use of econometric methods, redaction with chunk of codes, and even the slides for the presentation! However, I have also spent a non-negligible part of my time trying to have a correct layout, essentially for the first pages.
As Jenny Bryan said, one of the first things people do when there is a problem with the code is run it a second time. But in 95% of the cases (in my small programming experience), this does not solve the problem, and I realized I developed a small pattern of reactions when I am in this situation.
Read the error message This may seem obvious since this is the first thing we see when there is an error.
One of the greatest things about R is the possibility to build websites quite easily with R Shiny. I started to create apps with Shiny almost immediately after having discovered it. This was in May last year and two months later I thought it would be a great idea to build an app to treat more easily World Bank data. Indeed, in my field, World Development Indicators (WDI) are often used and I thought it would be useful to have a graphical interface where we can import and treat these indicators.
Currently working on my master’s thesis, I spend almost half on my day on R (the other half being spent reading articles). I have learnt a few very useful shortcuts by reading blog posts or free R books here and there and I have decided to make a small list of those I use most.
“Ctrl+Shift+Enter”: run the whole script This combination will run all of your script, wherever the mouse is in the script.
Files used and organization of the project Import data Merge dataframes Clean the data Descriptive Statistics Plots Note: In this and future articles, you will see some arrows below R code. If you click on it, it will display the Stata code equivalent to the R code displayed. However, since those are two different softwares, they are not completely equivalent and some of the Stata code may not fully correspond to the R code.
Before going into the details about studying economics with R, it makes sense to explain why you should use R compared to Stata. Before I start, please note that I have been using Stata occasionally for about a year whereas I spend much more time on R so I may forget some features that Stata has and that I am not aware of. However, I believe that what I have made with Stata corresponds to most Master students’ experiences, e.
