econpanel

Summary

This is an R package for collecting and formatting response data from several surveys of economists conducted by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and the Centre for Macroeconomics.

I will update the dataset semesterly (but feel free to poke me if i seem to have forgotten!). The functions used to scrape the websites are not exported as a way of discouraging unnecessary scraping.

Installation

Install the package as follows:

if (!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("corybrunson/econpanel", build_vignettes = TRUE)

Datasets

The package contains the following datasets:

• igm contains question statements and responses from the Initiative on Global Markets Economic Experts Panel.
• eigm contains the corresponding data from the IGM European panel.
• cfm contains question statements and responses from the Centre for Macroeconomics.
• planetmoney contains question statements and response tallies (not individual responses) from a 2016 story by Planet Money on economists' opinions about the U.S. presidential candidates' economic proposals. The panelists were drawn from the IGM pool.

Load the datasets as follows:

data(planetmoney, package = "econpanel")

The vignette "exploration" illustrates some questions and answers pursuable through these datasets. Access it as follows:

vignette(topic = "exploration", package = "econpanel")

Acknowledgments

I borrowed some insight from code at Chris Said's economist_poll repo. Also invaluable have been Hadley Wickam's rvest package and the SelectorGadget Chrome extension.