yes exactly. They say "if I randomly assign a 1 to some control units and a 0 to other control units, do I find a difference in outcomes for them"

A quote that I think is particularly relevant in thinking about AI doing writing for us. From Deirdre McCloskey's brilliant Economical Writing www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Art...

Kyle Butts Kyle Butts -- Urban Economics and Applied Econometrics

www.kylebutts.com/blog/2025-09...

Another day, another DID paper review where the authors "randomize treatment across locations" as a robustness check. *Sigh*

Anyone want to see what a DID "paper mill" I've discovered while refereeing?

TIL you can calculate the mean and the variance in one pass through a vector 🤯

Really nice article showing how:
nullbuffer.com/articles/wel...

If you have any questions about the U of A, please reach out! Happy to answer any questions :-)

And finally, the department! Our group is a very young and research focused. We have a great group of development/urban/labor folks with a mix of reduced form and structural approaches; A really strong experimental group; and a few applied econometricians who are happy to help!!

Concerned about the southern heat? Being within the Ozarks, makes the summer not too bad. Plus the winter is very temperate..

If sports are your thing, there's no place better than the SEC

Walmart, JB Hunt, Tyson Chicken are all headquartered here. Many large companies have campuses here as well.

This younger demographic brings a lot of consumptive amenities, like great food! Dinner with speakers is a nice treat..

The arts scene is magnificent:

- Walton Arts Center brings in Broadway shows all year
- Crystal Bridges is a world class art musuem
- The AMP has great live music

We are in the beautiful Ozark mountains with tons of hikes and incredible mountain biking opportunities.

The Razorback greenway makes biking to and from campus very easy and there's a few breweries along the way..

Come be a razorback! We are hiring two positions this year at the U of Arkansas!

Macro/General Equilibrium: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing....
Applied Micro: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

Northwest Arkansas is consistently ranked one of the best places to live. Here's some highlights!

yup! wrote this after refereeing yet another paper randomizing policy rollout in DID...

I have a script that should pop up after installing the extension and opening a do file. Does it not do that?

Does anyone have really good examples of a github repository for a research paper. Trying to get good examples for a lesson I'm giving

github.com/kylebutts/vs...
If you are using vscode and stata, you should try out my extension. It uses interactive window which let's you write in a `.do` file but get a notebook type experience.

The answer is all 0s !!! what a frustrating choice !!!!

one would hope!

Stata quiz. what do you think the output of `tab` will be?

```
sysuse auto, replace
reg mpg i.rep78 if rep78 == 2, nocons
predict xb
tab xb if rep78 != 2
```

Kyle Butts Kyle Butts -- Urban Economics and Applied Econometrics

kylebutts.com/blog/2025-04...

A short blog post for efficient stats coding. All about the importance of dimensionality when doing matrix operations ft. 100x speed-up of my code

TIL how to download census data (www2.census.gov) super simply.

Finder: Go > Connect to Server > ftp://ftp2.census.gov/. Login as guest and 🤯

great little explanation on why to avoid passive voice refactoringenglish.com/chapters/pas...

R tip: If you run code but forget to save it in a variable, you can use `.Last.value` in the console.

More, if you want to copy the result to your clipboard, use `clipr::write_last_clip`:

Scatter plot of bill depth vs. length by species (color) and sex (symbol). It shows positive correlations for all species with males tending to have bigger bills than females. sym <- c(1, 16) pal <- c("darkorange","purple","cyan4") plot(bill_dep ~ bill_len, data = penguins, pch = sym[sex], col = pal[species])

🚨 The "penguins" data is coming to the base #rstats{datasets} in 4.5.0!

@ellakaye.co.uk & @HeathrTurnr.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy r prepared an adapted and a raw version of the data set based on the {palmerpenguins} 📦 by @allisonhorst.bsky.social @apreshill.com and Kristen Gorman.

📈 Scatter plot:

WHAT YOU THOUGHT I ONLY HAVE 1 CUTE DOG ?? THINK AGAIN

Probably doesn’t matter much for this map, but I like st_point_on_surface() because centroids could be not within the shape for weird shaped counties

snow day in Fayetteville

Positron Assistant by georgestagg · Pull Request #6361 · posit-dev/positron Initial Positron Assistant scaffolding. FAO @jmcphers.

👀 github.com/posit-dev/po...