Syllabus - Data Visualization for Economics Research

Lyon Summer School in Empirical Research Methods - ENS de Lyon

Instructor

• Vincent Bagilet: vincent.bagilet@ens-lyon.fr

Course objectives and overview

A significant portion of communicating economic research results-whether in presentations or written papers—relies on graphs and visuals. This session aims to help you develop essential skills for effective data visualization and sharpen your interest and awareness of the topic. It discusses the importance of good visualization, describes a conceptual approach that can help us design our graphs and suggests general best practices.

Class outline

1. Why data viz matters in economics?
2. What are the characteristics of good data viz?
3. How to make an ok data viz?

Useful handbooks

Data Viz

Here is a short list of useful applied data visualization handbooks:

• Fundamentals of Data Visualization provides a great code-free introduction to data viz.¹
• Modern Data Visualization with R and Data Visualization - A practical introduction both discuss key data viz concepts and teaches you how to apply them in R and ggplot.
• R for Data Science provides a nice introduction to ggplot, THE package to build plots in R. To go further you can read this book.

Resources for implementation (in R)

R is a super useful tools for applied economics analysis (and way beyond that). Thanks to the ggplot package, it is also one of the best tools out there to make graphs in this field. If you do not know R, I would only encourage you to learn and use it. To do so, here is a list of useful resources:

• R for Data Science: definitely the best resource to learn R and the tidyverse by yourself.
• R cheatsheets: great summaries of the functions in key tidyverse packages.
• The tidyverse style guide: a very short book to help you write more legible R code.
• Tidy design principles a more advanced book to help you write better R code.

Footnotes

1. Although R code can be found on the book’s GitHub if needed.