R Data

On most occasions you would want to use data which already exist in some electronic form (lucky you that you did not study in the 70s when you had to trawl through paper back-copies of some statistical agency and copy data by hand and then enter manually into some spreadsheet). The question then is how to import these data into R and use them for your statistical or econometric analysis.

Upload a data file to your working directory

In the first instance I want you to download this mroz.xls 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].

Make sure that you note down in which folder you save this file. Save it in a folder in which you want to save your work. We shall soon call this folder our working directory. At this stage we have not yet made the data available to R. This will come soon!

File Formats

Return to the R Start page.