R for Economic Research: Essential tools for modern economic analysis

Economic Research has increasingly benefited from programming to automate processes and refine analyzes. However, the teaching of economics has lagged significantly behind in this aspect. This results in a large number of professionals who do not know how to implement their routines efficiently or on an adequate scale to meet day-to-day demands, particularly in the financial market. R for Economic Research is a mandatory reading for those who have some knowledge of R programming but still lack the necessary tools to carry out professional economic analysis. After reading this book, the reader will be ready to: Import and process data from both flat files and APIs; Transform routines into efficient functions which can be run at scale; Perform common operations, such as seasonal adjustment, deflating nominal values to real values and applying filters to smooth the data; Implement all necessary steps to obtain reliable and accurate forecasts for economic variables; Set up systems of equations that allow evaluating the economic outcomes under alternative scenarios; and Employ state-space models for various applications, from estimating time-varying coefficients to extracting common trends among variables. About the author: J. Renato Leripio has almost 10 years of professional experience as a quantitative economist. He has worked in both the public and private sector and is currently a Lead Data Scientist at a large hedge fund, in charge of developing tools to improve the accuracy of economic forecasts. He regularly participates in academic and corporate events, showing his work and debating the challenges in the field.