[open-economics] Financial Comparisons

[Tryggvi Björgvinsson]

Hi again,

On lau 8.jún 2013 12:00, Florian Oswald wrote:
> regarding how to do those index adjustments you were talking about, here's
> a simple example of an explanation:
>
> http://people.duke.edu/~rnau/411infla.htm

This page does a good job of explaining how to do adjustments (although
it assumes no gaps in the data which is still my biggest problem).

Thanks a lot for this pointer!

> Just look at the illustrating spreadsheet, it is quite easy to understand I
> think. It also shows how to change the base year of the index, which could
> be quite important if you are going to combine many different datasets in
> the end. For example, if you combine two time series X and Y,
>
> X: from date 1 thru date 100
> Y: from date 80 thru date 300
>
> you must choose a base date for both series in the overlapping region
> 80-100. This is all quite common sense but very easy to mess up.

That's good to know. I would probably have missed this if I would go and
try and combine data.

> I looked at your data package, it's great. Just to make sure, do you know
> FRED?
> http://research.stlouisfed.org/

No I haven't seen FRED before. It looks good. Isn't it only economic
data for the US though?

> I think there's a ton of other useful data you could package up in this way
> and I think it would be a great service. I started my own modest attempt at
> doing so (after I googled "unemployment rates by US state over time" for
> the 100th time) and I collect the datasets here:
>
> https://github.com/floswald/Rdata
>
> It stores everything as R data but might as well be csv.

Hmm... I'm packaging this according to the standard as described on
http://dataprotocols.org (it only defines a CSV format (as Simple Data
Format) at the moment). I think it could define R formatted data as well.

Since you mention R (unfortunately I don't use it but I really want to
try it out). There is an R client that supports interaction with Data
Packages (the standard defined on dataprotocols.org):

https://github.com/QBRC/RODProt

You might be interested in it.

> other data to package up could be Robert Shiller's house price and stock
> market data:
>
> http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm

Here's the Case-Shiller house price index:
http://data.okfn.org/data/house-prices-us

It's taken from Standard & Poor's.

> and yes, the entire Reinhardt and Rogoff suite (not only inflation but all
> the other stuff as well - after the recent debacle I should be surprised if
> they wouldn't be more than happy to make the data open). In fact, now that
> government datastores are picking up speed (and "official data" like
> inflation and unemployment are easier accessible via data.gov and
> data.gov.uk and the like) I think there would be a very big value in trying
> to get individual reseacher's data out there.

I haven't heard anything from them yet but I'll let you know as soon as
I hear anything. Good to know that they are potentially open to it.

> I may be getting ahead of myself here - not sure what your plan is. Anyway
> let's talk more if you think there's some scope here.

Well, my plan isn't all that grand. I just need to automatically adjust
for inflation in OpenSpending. I don't know what years might pop up in
the system so I just have to know what to do when I don't have an index
value for a particular year.

The data package stuff is just me trying to implement it in the most
reusable way possible :-)

Thanks a bunch for your help. I really appreciate it.

-- 

Tryggvi Björgvinsson

Technical Lead, OpenSpending

The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org>

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