Metametrik Sprint in London, May 25

Two years ago, I presented an idea at the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin to store econometric results in a machine-readable format which would facilitate meta-analyses, organize the ever growing body of empirical work and help sharing economic results. 

Since then, the idea has been gradually evolving but it is now time for a big push: On the 25th of May 2013, the Open Economics Working Group of the OKFN will hold a sprint at C4CC in London. If you are an academic economist, PhD student or econ enthusiast, please feel free to join in. More details here. 

ISSEM 2013

I will be joining my undergraduate institution, HU Berlin, to teach a (late) summer school course in Development Economics at the International Summer School in Economics and Management at the Universidad de la Habana between 23. Sep - 4. Oct 2013. For more details, click here. 

Presenting at the PhD Conference in Warwick

I'll be presenting my working paper on reputation effects in outsourcing at the PhD Conference in Warwick next week, 8-9th March 2013. You can view the abstract here. 

The Benefits of Open Data (part II) – Impact on Economic Research

I just wrote the second part of the blog post “The Benefits of Open Data”, looking at how opening up datasets and access to research output can help produce better research.

Here is the link

The Benefits of Open Data – Evidence from Economic Research

I have just written a contribution to the Open Economics WG Blog on the benefits of open data. This is the first part of a three part blog post on “Mainstreaming Openness in Economics”. I hope you like it and am looking forward to your comments!

Read the post here

How will your future weather be?

Climate change is hard to observe and visualize: Tell someone that the average temperature of Haiti is projected to be about 2 degrees Celsius warmer in 2045-2065, and most people will probably think: “Hey, that does not sound so bad!”. Putting data into context hence matters a lot for communicating information.

As part of the Greenhackathon at the OKFestival in Helsinki last month I wrote a simple app that tells you to which country today your country’s future weather will most likely correspond to. While a warming by 2 degrees does not sound bad for Haiti, knowing that this would imply a similar climate to Cote d’Ivoire today provides a much more tangible real-life comparison.

The app uses World Bank data and the Euclidean distance to calculate a similarity matrixfrom which to pull the best matches. Thanks go to Tim Herzog for suggesting the idea.

View “Future Weather App“