Thesis Supervision

Previous students found the following papers helpful for writing their thesis dissertations:

• 1. Gerard, François & Joana Naritomi. "Job Displacement Insurance & (the Lack of) Consumption-Smoothing." American Economic Review (2021)

• 2. Alvarez, Jorge, et al. "Firms and the Decline in Earnings Inequality in Brazil." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics (2018)

• 3. Chetty, Raj, et al. "Is the US Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility." American Economic Review (2014)

• 4. Chetty, Raj, et al. "The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database built Using Private Sector Data." NBER (2020)

• 5. Moreira, Sara. "Firm Dynamics, Persistent Effects of Entry Conditions, and Business Cycles." Job Market Paper (2016)

• 6. Stepner, Michael. "The Insurance Value of Redistributive Taxes and Transfers." Job Market Paper (2019)

• 7. Yagan, Danny. "Employment Hysteresis from the Great Recession." Journal of Political Economy (2019)

• 8. Harasztosi, Péter, and Attila Lindner. "Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?" American Economic Review (2019)

• 9. Autor, Dorn & Hanson. "The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade." Annual Review of Economics (2016) 

• 10. Lagos, Lorenzo. "Labor Market Institutions and the Composition of Firm Compensation: Evidence from Brazilian Collective Bargaining." Job Market Paper (2019) 

• 11. Dix-Carneiro & Kovak. "Trade Liberalization and Regional Dynamics." American Economic Review (2017)

• 12. Balboni et al. "Why do People Stay Poor?" Quarterly Journal of Economics (2021)

Accessing INE datasets (Portuguese administrative data) under my supervision:

Working with INE data without prior approval from INE is strictly prohibited. To get accredited the following steps are necessary:

1. Visit INE's microdata website and decide which dataset(s) you are interested in getting access to;

2. Fill in the forms found under this webpage;

3. After your supervisor(s) signed the paperwork, submit these forms at the Direção Geral de Estatísticas da Educação e Ciência. The physical site of the directorate can be found below. 

Teaching — Applied Economics and Development Economics

Helpful coding resources for these courses include:

• STATA cheat sheets;

• R Markdown cheat sheets;

• Base R cheat sheets;

• Oscar Torres-Reyna's data analysis materials are an excellent start;

• Adriana Conconi's Introduction to Stata lecture;

• For those keen on learning The Julia Programming Language, cheat sheets were recently made available;

• The Julia Youtube Channel is also great to learn the language.

• Datacamp is an excellent resource to improve your programming skills (a handful of introductory courses are offered free of charge).

• Andrew Heiss has an excellent sequence of videos to make you familiar with R applied to public policy questions. 

• Raj Chetty's course Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems is an excellent learning repository. 

Helpful methodological readings include:

1. Koenker, Roger, & Kevin F. Hallock. "Quantile Regression." Journal of Economic Perspectives (2001)

2. Abadie, Alberto. "Using Synthetic Controls: Feasibility, Data Requirements, and Methodological Aspects." Journal of Economic Literature (2021)

3. Lee, David S., & Thomas Lemieux. "Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics." Journal of Economic Literature (2010)

4. Callaway, Brantly, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, and Pedro HC Sant'Anna. "Difference-in-Differences with a Continuous Treatment." (2021)

5. Bertrand, M, Duflo, E, & Mullainathan, S. "How much should we Trust Difference in Differences Estimates?" Quarterly Journal of Economics (2004).

6. Abadie, Athey, Imbens, & Wooldridge. "When Should you Adjust Standard Errors for Clustering?" NBER Working Paper (2017)

7. Fortin, Nicole, Thomas Lemieux, & Sergio Firpo. "Decomposition Methods in Economics." Handbook of Labor Economics (2011)

Helpful tips to learn how to write your course essays academically include:

• John Cochrane's notes;

Helpful tips to using descriptive statistics in research projects:

• Neal Mahoney's paper is an excellent source;

Helpful course readings include:

1. Jensen, R. (2010). “The (Perceived) Return to Education and the Demand for Schooling”, Quarterly Journal of Economics

2. Miguel, E., & Kremer, M. (2004). "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities" Econometrica

3. Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). "Are Emily & Greg more Employable than Lakisha & Jamal? Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." American Economic Review

4. Di Tella, R., & Schargrodsky, E. (2004). "Do Police Reduce Crime? Estimates using the Allocation of Police Forces after a Terrorist Attack." American Economic Review

5. Bastos, P., Silva, J., & Verhoogen, E. (2018). "Export Destinations and Input Prices." American Economic Review

6. Harasztosi, P., & Lindner, A. (2019). "Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?" American Economic Review

7. Messina, J., & Silva, J. (2021). "Twenty Years of Wage Inequality in Latin America", World Bank Economic Review

8. Chetty, Friedman, Hendren, Jones, and Porterm (2018). "The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility." NBER

Open Source Datasets for these Courses

Check helpful publicly available data resources for these courses:

• United Nations Data: Select your country of interest in the box, and see everything they have. http://data.un.org/Default.aspx 

• World Bank: Most data are available through website, but some you might need to register. http://data.worldbank.org/ or http://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/exporter-dynamics-database/ (Check Exporter Dynamics Database Version 2.0);

• World Bank Doing Business Data: Great for those more interested in business and multinationals, also useful for decoupling institutions http://www.doingbusiness.org/data 

• International Monetary Fund Data: They also have rich databases including the International Financial Statistics (IFS). You will need to register. http://www.imf.org/external/data.htm

• Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD): Has a large list of potential data sources. http://ipl.econ.duke.edu/dthomas/dev_data/index.html 

• The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI): In particular, check out the “Resources” and “Countries” tabs. http://www.ifpri.org/ 

• JPal Dataverse: has many datasets and even code for several of their affiliated professors’ papers. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jpal 

• Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID) Datasets http://www.cid.harvard.edu/ciddata/ciddata.html 

• Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): Has, among others, education (and PISA microdata) and foreign aid statistics https://www.oecd-library.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2018_eag-2018-en http://www.oecd.org/pisa/data or http://www.oecd.org/dac/financing-sustainable-development/ 

• International Labor Organization: Has data on labor market flexibility, unemployment, and other labor statistics https://www.ilo.org/global/statistics-and-databases/lang--en/index.htm 

• Peter Schott Webpage: Has USA exports data http://faculty.som.yale.edu/peterschott/sub_international.htm 

• World Integrated Trade Solutions (WITS). Has data on exports, imports, tariffs and NTM. Requires registration. https://wits.worldbank.org 

• Penn World Tables http://cid.econ.ucdavis.edu/pwt.html 

• Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group: Some interesting US & Canada longitudinal datasets, mostly on higher education https://hceconomics.uchicago.edu/resources/data-guide 

• Opportunity Insights: Group led by Prof. Chetty, has datasets that allow you to analyze social mobility and a variety of other outcomes from life expectancy to patent rates by neighborhood, college, parental income level, and racial background. US only. https://opportunityinsights.org/data/ 

• Google Dataset Search: It’s worth searching whate you want to work with to see the results that The Oracle recommends https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch 

• PORDATA: Has statistics about municipalities, Portugal and Europe https://www.pordata.pt 

• Banco de Portugal https://www.bportugal.pt/EstatisticasWeb/(S(qlogwsexf0cg0v45b0zrq555))/Default.aspx 

• Instituto Nacional de Estatística https://www.ine.pt

• Agência de Gestão da Tesouraria e da Divida Publica – Portugal (IGPC) https://www.igcp.pt/en/1-4-399/statistics/ 

• UCP Library’s Databases and Periodicals 

• Information services and Databases at CATOLICA-LISBON 

• Thomson Reuteurs Eikon