Speakers
Description
Our first session doesn't start with R. It starts with asking students to unzip a folder. Every year, some of them can't.
This is the reality of teaching empirical economics today. Students arrive having grown up on tablets and smartphones, fluent in apps but lost in a file system. Getting them to difference-in-differences feels, at first, impossibly far away.
And yet, that's exactly what we do in a single semester.
We'll share how we built a course that takes students with zero programming experience through the full journey: from navigating RStudio for the first time, to visualising data, to running regressions and thinking seriously about causality. Using the tidyverse with the fixest package as our central tools, we move step by step from cross-sectional correlations to panel regressions, instrumental variables, and difference-in-differences designs.
Along the way we picked up a few tricks. Green and red post-it notes to read the room without putting anyone on the spot. Supervised computer-lab exams instead of take-home group work: our answer to free-riding, and to a world where AI can answer your problem set in seconds.
The goal was never just syntax. It was to send students away able to sit down, open RStudio, interrogate a dataset, and approach causal claims with a healthy dose of scepticism.
We'll share what worked, what didn't, and what we wish we'd known earlier.
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| Keywords: Please list up to 5 keywords to help us find the right session for your contribution. | teaching, first-time R users, computer literacy in economics, course design |
|---|---|
| Virtual Option | This submission is for onsite presentation only |
| Video Recording | Video sharing is fine |
| The author(s) agree(s) to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the submission and is/are authorized to present it. | Confirm |