The tagline of this blog says something replicable development economics using R and git. So far, I have posted gimmicks on new R tools such as shiny, rmarkdown, and my own package. Also, I have posted on how to use Git, Github, and Jekyll to write a website/blog. However, I have never brought the two together and how this features into creating replicable research. In this post I will briefly describe what Git and R are, and how I use them for my work. I hope to post something tomorrow about useful resources for mastering both these tools (tomorrow’s post).

The below image is licenced under CC-BY-4.0

What are jekyll, markdown, and git(hub)? and why would you need all of this for a blog, in stead of a simple Blogspot of Wordpress page? The short answer is more control, by having fewer and more transparent layers, you retain more control over the content and layout of your blog. Since launching this blog last week, I have received a number of question about how to set up something similar. Below I briefly describe the main steps for setting up a jekyll blog, and tomorrow I will go into the details of how I customised this one.

I am proud to announce the beta version of the decompr R package. The package implements Export Decomposition using the Wang-Wei-Zhu (Wang, Wei, and Zhu 2013) and Kung-Fu (Mehrotra, Kung, and Grosky 1990) algorithms. It comes with a sample data set from the WIOD project, and has its own mini site. Update, the decompr package in now available on CRAN, also announced in this post Inputs The package uses Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables, such as World Input Outpt Database (Timmer et al. 2012).

ggvis is wonderful new tool to create interactive graphics, which was build with Shiny apps in mind. In this post I will go over how you can create a Shiny app using ggvis and incorporating the ‘app’ in an rmarkdown slideshow (interactively). Sepal-Modeling is a shiny app (repo), which uses ggvis to fit LOESS smoothers on the sepal ratios of the iris dataset. There are separate smoothers for every species, as well as a general smoother for all observations. The span can be adjusted in order to see if we need to model the sepal ratio per species or if we can just model it jointly.