Josh Merfeld (@Josh_Merfeld) / X

Josh Merfeld

33.1K posts

Josh Merfeld

@Josh_Merfeld

Brisbane, Queensland

joshmerfeld.github.io

Joined June 2009

Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Nov 20, 2023
I taught a new advanced masters/intro Ph.D. course on applied microeconometrics in R this semester. Everything is on GitHub, which means it's freely available for all! I spent a lot of time talking about coding, which might not be clear from the slides.
GitHub - JoshMerfeld/applied-microeconometrics: Course website for Ph.D. Applied Microeconometrics...
From github.com
139K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Dec 31, 2021
Log normal distribution
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Dec 5, 2022
Replying to @emmabwiles
Oh wow. What a nasty thing to do.
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Oct 6, 2024
Don’t use these plots
Matt Dancho (Business Science)
@mdancho84
Oct 6, 2024
Stop using box plots. Use this plot instead. Here's why:
82K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Jul 24, 2022
New paper! Thread later this week joshmerfeld.github.io/assets/papers/…
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Mar 25, 2024
This guy is a professor of CS at UW, and yet he's purposefully misleading you. How? By obscuring changes in the mean with countries with relatively large temperature swings from month to month. Plus a very specific subset of all countries
Pedro Domingos
@pmddomingos
Mar 24, 2024
Average temperatures by month instead of year, and suddenly the climate crisis looks like a joke.
114K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Oct 26, 2025
People at low-ranked US universities are also “excluded” from top-ranked journals. It’s almost like it’s basically a resource issue. Have to teach a lot? Don’t have research funds? Bad incentives? Good luck competing with someone at Harvard who gets a sabbatical in year two.
Philipp Heimberger
@heimbergecon
Oct 24, 2025
This paper shows that authors from low-income countries remain excluded from top-ranked economics journals and receive less attention from other economists. Developing country authors are far less likely to be published in top journals even when holding citation counts constant.
58K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Dec 14, 2024
Just to stir up some fun: I used stata (exclusively for many years). I never learned R in grad school, at least not seriously. A couple years ago, I had a paper I wanted to write, but it was impossible to write using stata because of some geospatial stuff I would have to do…
67K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Sep 14, 2024
Men will literally make packages for geospatial data in Stata instead of learning R.
Asjad Naqvi
@AsjadNaqvi
Sep 13, 2024
The #Stata #Oslo 2024 conference #presentations (Keynote + Stataviz part 6) are now up on #GitHub: github.com/asjadnaqvi/The… In the #keynote I discussed major advancements in making #maps in Stata. Two examples from the talk: 1) Hospitals locations that are converted into count
29K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Aug 5, 2024
I know this is a joke but this is the U.S.’s biggest strength. It’s one of a few countries where, no matter where you’re from or what you look like, you can become “one of them.”
Melissa Chen
@MsMelChen
Aug 4, 2024
Nobody beats China except China (This is the Team USA that finally beat China after countless years of trying for Olympic gold in table tennis)
Readers added context
Team USA is comprised of Americans. Moreover, team China has not played team USA thus far at the 2024 Paris Olympics. usatt.org/womens-senior-… nbcolympics.com/news/china-ext…
17K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
May 27, 2025
One of our PhD students had a fully funded scholarship to be at one of the best universities in the US (not Harvard) for the summer, where she'd learn from a top economist. Visa rejected. I really hate my country sometimes.
39K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Jul 28, 2025
Replying to @ryancbriggs
In Korea kids as young as seven or eight take public transit alone. Was happy to see some primary students on the bus alone here in Brisbane (older, but can’t imagine that in the US).
18K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
May 22, 2024
We spend so much time teaching students how to estimate things in R/Stata/whatever, but we completely ignore the most time-consuming component of all empirical work: data cleaning. Should seriously have a course devoted to nothing else.
115K
Josh Merfeld
@Josh_Merfeld
Dec 4, 2022
Oh no. Undergrads are going to get worse at statistics because of this thing!