R

R is an open source software that has been been adopted by the statistical community as its standard software package. It is a command driven software, meaning that you will have to give the software written commands to indicate what you do. On first sight this is not as convenient as a menu driven software, but it has the huge advantage that you can collect a large set of commands in a file (script file) and then have R execute all these commands in one go. This then serves as a great documentation of the work you have done and most importantly it makes it easy to change a small aspect of your work and rerun the entire project on the press of a button rather than having to laboriously retrace all your steps through menus.

The fixed cost of learning this software is higher than learning a menu driven statistical software package. But if you engage with this process the rewards will be great.

Last not least, R has a killer advantage. It is free!!!

Installing the Software

Installation Demonstration

To work with R you will have to install the basic software package R, but we also advise you to install RStudio, which is an add-on to R (formally called an Integrated Development Environment - IDE) which makes working with R somewhat easier.

As this is open-source software that you get for free it is perhaps understandable that the webpages from which you get the R software aren't as slick as you expect. And the language tends to be somewhat more techy, but don't worry, you'll be fine.

So here are the steps you should take.

1. Download and install the R software, which is available from the CRAN website. Follow the "Download and Install R" link (and do not be tempted to download the source code!) for your operating system. If you have a window OS only choose the "base" package on the following screen. Then follow the usual installation instructions. You could now already work with R, but we recommend that you first undertake the next step.
2. Once we have installed R, we can download and install RStudio. You can download it from the RStudio download page.

The basic R software has some basic functionality, but the power of R comes from the ability to use code written to perform statistical and econometric techniques that has been written by other people. These additional pieces of software are called packages and the next step will be to learn how ot use these.

Basic Tasks

TO illustrate how to perform basic tasks in R we will use data that you can download from here: mroz.xls. This is an Excel file that contains a dataset which we will use for our first steps in R. It is a well used cross-sectional dataset with 753 observations of female members of the labour force in the US (in 1975). It contains variables such as the number of children, the wage, the hours worked etc. A bit more detail on the data and the variables can be found in this file. See also [1].

First Steps	Loading Data and Date Formats	Basic Data Analysis	A Regression
Discussion	Discussion	Discussion	Discussion

Using Packages	Saving Data and Screen Output
Discussion	Discussion

Bread and Butter Techniques

These are standard econometric problems tasks that any applied econometrician, and indeed aspiring economics students, should be familiar with.

Regression diagnostics	Robust standard errors
Discussion	Discussion

Econometric Demonstrations

In this section you can find code that can be useful to demonstrate a few econometric issues.

Demonstrating OLS estimator unbiasedness	Demonstrating OLS estimator asymptotic behaviour
Discussion	Discussion

Univariate Time Series Modelling
Discussion

More references

There is a plethora of resources if you want to learn R (which is one reason why this resource does not go into too much detail). Here are a few places to start.

• A Beginner's Guide to R
• Some R resources provided by UCLA
• Quick-R web-site and first chapter of R in Action
• Just TryR it! [2]