Welcome!
I'm Grady King, and this is my repository for my research project investigating the impact of the 2014 Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions on heart disease mortality.
Check out my final Economic Affairs paper here, and my final poster here if you're interested!
As a disclaimer, I was a beginner at R during this project, so my code might be suboptimal, and I am also not a statistician or econometrician, so my methodology might be shaky. I think I got better as I went through the project though, and I've since learned more about reproducibility.
The main two causal inference estimators I used were a staggered two-stage difference-in-difference (did2s) for nationwide analysis and synthetic difference-in-difference (synthdid) for the adjacent state analyses due to its robustness in smaller settings.
The final figures in my paper, and where they were created is in figures/final paper/README.md.
This project is not fantastically organized, but it is separated okay-ish. All of my R source files are in the main folder, along with my RStudio project file and associated files with that. The figures/ folder has all of the plots and maps I generated during the project, and the poster/ folder has all the files I used to make my poster for the summer undergrad symposium. rawData/ has some raw files from certain sources, which should all have a link.txt file describing where I got the data. formattedData/ is kind of a weird folder, because it has some imported data from my previous project during the spring, as well as some cleaned data that I created during the project. Most of my R code uses data from this folder, or formats data to be put into this folder. If you have any questions on where I obtained some of this data, feel free to email me!
renv/ is a folder that contains renv information, which essentially keeps track of all the libraries I used during the project so that other people can easily download them. adjacentCountiesData/, baconDecomp/, and socialFactorData/ are all small subsections of the project or minor offshoots, adjacent counties results are in figures/comparing adjacent states, and social factor results are in figures/social factor plots. baconDecomp just has some results of a Bacon decomposition, which was just one of my side projects to understand two-way fixed effects (TWFE) more. notes/ has personal notes that I wrote for each week, some of which are probably pretty whiny, I wouldn't recommend reading them.
This code uses R version 4.2.3, make sure to use that version if you're trying to run code. The required R packages and their versions are stored in renv, so one just needs to run renv::restore() to install the correct versions of the libraries (it might take a while). Make sure you have Rtools42 installed so that you have the make utility to compile some of the libraries that require building from their source.
Check my main GitHub page for updated contact info.