Preface

Introduction

This book is your guide to preparing for a career in Economics and Finance. These fields need you to be great at understanding and explaining data. This book will help you improve your data science and analytics skills, and use them to answer questions about business cycles, economic growth, and financial markets.

A significant part of this book is about teaching you how to program in R, a popular language used for data analysis and graphics. You’ll also learn how to use complementary software like RStudio, R Markdown, and LaTeX to craft professional reports that showcase your data analyses.

But it’s not all about coding. We’ll also explore economic indicators to help you understand business cycles and regional differences in economic performance. You’ll learn about traditional measures like GDP growth, inflation, money supply, and interest rates. We also touch on newer, survey- and text-based indicators, such as consumer confidence indices and news-based indicators of economic uncertainty, which come from language analysis of newspapers, social media, or Google searches.

The book is divided into six parts:

Each part builds on the previous one, providing you with a coherent learning journey.

By the time you finish this book, you’ll be ready to analyze a wide range of economic and financial data. Your learning progress will be assessed based on the completion of DataCamp courses and the production of three data reports, one for each module.

Author

Julian F. Ludwig
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
Texas Tech University
253 Holden Hall
Lubbock, TX 79409

Website: www.julianfludwig.com
Email: julian.ludwig@ttu.edu

Education

  • Ph.D., Economics, University of Texas at Austin, 2019
  • M.S., Economics, University of Texas at Austin, 2016
  • M.S., International and Monetary Economics, University of Bern in Switzerland, 2014
  • B.S., Economics, University of Bern in Switzerland, 2012

Research Interests

  • Macroeconomics
  • Time Series Econometrics

Courses Offered

  • ECO 5316 Time Series Econometrics
  • ECO 5311 Macroeconomic Theory and Policy
  • ECO 4306 Economic and Business Forecasting
  • ECO 4300 Economic Research: Data-Driven Analysis
  • ECO 3323 Principles of Money, Banking and Credit

Book Navigation

To make the most of this reading experience, it’s essential to familiarize yourself with the available interactive features of this GitBook.1

You can adjust font size and type using the “A” letter icon located in the top-left toolbar. Clicking on this icon reveals a dropdown menu where you can select font size (using the smaller “A” for reducing and the larger “A” for increasing size) and font type (choosing between Serif and Sans). The same dropdown also allows you to switch between predefined themes: White, Sepia, or Night.

Navigating between chapters is straightforward. Arrows on the side of the page, or using the left and right arrows on your keyboard, allow you to move between chapters easily. You can also use the table of contents located in the left sidebar, offering a complete overview and direct links to every chapter and subsection in the book.

The left sidebar, which houses the table of contents, can be toggled on or off. Do this by pressing the “s” key or clicking on the icon with four horizontal parallel lines in the toolbar.

You can search for specific words or phrases across the entire book. Activate the search function by pressing the “f” key or clicking the magnifying glass symbol in the toolbar.

If you prefer to read offline, the book can be downloaded as a PDF file. To do this, click the Adobe Acrobat symbol in the toolbar.

On the top right of the page, you’ll find social media buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Weibo, and Instapaper. These allow you to share individual chapters on your social media profiles and invite comments.

By understanding these features and customizations, you can significantly improve your reading and navigation experience when working through this book.

References

———. 2024a. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with r Markdown. https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown. R package version 0.38.

  1. You’re currently reading a GitBook, generated with R Markdown using the bookdown package (Xie 2024a). GitBook is a platform that started as an open-source tool for writing and publishing books, and has evolved into a popular documentation platform. R Markdown is an R file format combining text and code to produce dynamic, reproducible documents. The bookdown package enhances R Markdown, providing specialized tools for writing books. The combination of these technologies allows for the creation of this interactive and well-structured book you’re reading now.↩︎