Templates for Reproducible Research Projects in Economics

An empirical or computational research project only becomes a useful building block for science when all steps can be easily repeated and modified by others. This means that we should automate as much as possible, compared to pointing and clicking with a mouse or, more generally, keeping track yourself of what needs to be done.

This is a collection of templates where much of this automation is pre-configured via describing the research workflow as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) using pytask. You just need to:

  • Install the template for the main language in your project (Python, R, Stata, Matlab, …)

  • Move your programs to the right places and change the placeholder scripts

  • Run pytask, which will build your entire project the first time you run it. Later, it will automatically figure out which parts of the project need to be rebuilt.

Download this tutorial as pdf