Writing Productivity Boosters

This LSE Impact blog post has some nice tips for increasing writing productivity. I think they work just as well for writing Stata dofiles as they do for writing papers. My favorite suggestion is the first one. I tend to do all of things that end up on my Outlook calendar (meetings with students, dentist appointments, etc.). Why not block out time for research as well?

Fake LaTex

I really hate to be a proponent of fake anything. But it's so much easier to offer comments on students' papers written in word, and yes, I know that some people take LaTex people more seriously than Word people. So, here it is: Instructions on how to make your Word document not look like a Word document. Use it if you must. But for the official record, I'm very happy with Word documents that look like Word documents. H/T: David McKenzie and Marc Bellemare. 

More on Synthetic Control Methods

Arindrajit Dube has an excellent twitter thread on synthetic control methods. Super-informative throughout. I really like the discussion at the end with Wojtek Kopczuk who writes, "My preference, when possible, is to first see a variant of diff-in-diff (as simple as practical for the context) to show the presence of an effect and only then run SC to get precision. Then you hopefully get both transparent identification and tight estimates." 

PDF Document to Excel Sheets, No Problem

Let's say you find the exact data you need, but it's in a lovely PDF report.  Do you hunker down and copy the numbers into an excel sheet--possibly making mistakes? Win a grant so you can pay someone else to do it--who again may make mistakes? No need. There's an ap for that! See here. If the link ever stops working, google "PDF Table Extractor".  

Why I Never Blog About Theory

Francesco Amodio just tweeted the answer: