Final Data Project Instructions
The goal of this project is to perform. basic empirical macroeconomic analysis similar to the midterm data
project, but using a new dataset that you nd. You should start by browsing websites like the ones listed
below. You will likely need to download a CSV le to your computer from these websites and you may need
to make some edits to the CSV in excel before uploading it to R (usually when you download data from the
web there are a few extraneous descriptions etc. You want the data to look like the dataset we used for the
midterm project.
1) The rst task for this project is to provide 3 interesting comparisons (eg the unemployment rate in
wartime vs in peacetime or the in ation rate in republican vs democratic regimes). For each comparison
provide a written explanation for what you think is going on or what the main takeaway is.
2) The second task is to create three di erent plots. These can be either cross-sectional (eg obervations
from di erent countries for a particular year such as GDP vs literacy in 50 di erent countries in 2014) or
time-series (eg data for one country over time). On a least one graph you should include multiple lines of
data to facilitate a comparison (i.e plotting in ation and unemployment together or plotting growth in GDP
in the U.S vs in China over time). You should provide written commentary regarding the plots i.e why they
are interesting, what is happening over time and possible explanations for why.
Some good sources of macroeconomic data are:
The St Louis Federal Reserve (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/)
The World Bank (https://data.worldbank.org/)
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (https://www.bea.gov)
The European University Institute -