Syllabus - Data Visualization for Economics Research

Lyon Summer School in Empirical Research Methods - ENS de Lyon

Instructor

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. We will cover fundamental visualization principles and general best practices before examining the specific challenges of data visualization for causal inference. While it can be a powerful rhetorical tool for causal inference, data visualizations can also be misleading if not handled carefully.

Class outline

  1. Introduction
  2. Usefulness and importance
  3. Key data viz principles
  4. Building a graph
  5. Data viz for research in economics
  6. Main take-away points

Useful handbooks

Data Viz

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

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:

Footnotes

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