Replicate MHE Table 4.1.1 and Figure 4.1.1

What this repo does

We replicate Table 4.1.1 and Figure 4.1.1 from Mostly Harmless Econometrics using a reproducible research workflow.

Our weapons of choice are:

• Snakemake to manage the build and dependencies
• R for statistical analysis

How to Build this repo

If you have Snakemake and R installed, navigate your terminal to this directory.

Installing Missing R packages

To ensure all R libraries are installed, type

snakemake install_packages

into a your terminal and press RETURN.

If you modify the packages used in this repo, you should rerun this command to store package updates in the REQUIREMENTS.txt.

Building the Output

Type:

snakemake all

into a your terminal and press RETURN

See HELP.txt for explanation of what the Snakemake Rules are doing.

Install instructions

Installing R

• Install the latest version of R by following the instructions here.
  • You can ignore the RStudio instructions for the purpose of this project.

Installing Snakemake

This project uses Snakemake to execute our research workflow. You can install snakemake as follows:

• Install Snakemake from the command line (needs pip, and Python)

  pip install snakemake
  

  • If you haven't got Python installed click here for instructions

• Windows and old Mac OSX users: you may need to manually install the datrie package if you are getting errors. Using conda, this seems to work best:

  conda install datrie
  

Installing pandoc and LaTeX

Because we want to generate pdf outputs we need two additional bits of software to make that happen:

• If you do not have RStudio installed, you will have to install Pandoc (http://pandoc.org)
• If you do not have LaTeX installed, we recommend that you install TinyTeX (https://yihui.name/tinytex/)
  • TinyTeX is a lightweight, portable, cross-platform, and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution.
  • From inside R:

    install.packages('tinytex')
    tinytex::install_tinytex()  # install TinyTeX
    

Visualization of the Workflow

Snakemake workflows are a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We can visualize the relationship between the rules (a simplified view of the DAG) in our workflow:

Check out the rules in for various visualizations of the workflow near the bottom of the Snakefile in the 'Snakemake Workflow graphs'. You will need to install graphviz to run these rules - we have included a rule inside dag.smk to install this for you.

Updates to Workflow Example

Periodic updates the workflow occur as I find better/simpler ways to do things and as my opinions on best practice evolve. Major changes are tracked in the NEWS file with brief descriptions of the changes implemented.

Comments / Suggestions / Issues

I'd love to hear your comments, suggestions or installation issues encountered when running the example. Post an issue on Github.

Suggested Citation:

Deer, Lachlan, 2020. "Replication of Angrist and Krueger (1991) with Snakemake : Table 4.1.1 and Figure 4.1.1 from Mostly Harmless Econometrics.