Principles of Programming
(Applied Python in Economics)

Class Overview

This course aims to acquaint students with the basics of the Python programming language and its application to data collection, manipulation, visualization, and analysis. During the course, the students will learn how to write code, gather data from web sources using modern scraping techniques, organize data into a usable format, and analyze data collections to answer questions about the world.

We will begin with an introduction to general-purpose programming: data types, conditionals, loops, functions, and classes. We will investigate how to write succinct and efficient code. We will then see how to gather data from the web by using the python library and represent it inside python as a DataFrame. We will investigate how programming can help us clean and present the data in an informative and elegant manner. Finally, we will focus on using data to answer real economic questions, covering popular exploratory and statistical data analysis techniques.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

• • Install python on a Windows computer, write and run a python file.

  • Implement general-purpose programming techniques.

  • Understand data types, conditionals, loops, functions, and classes.

  • Have a working knowledge of Markdown and basic LATEX equations.

  • Use the Pandas Python Library to create and manipulate DataFrames.

  • Use Python to organize and present data.

  • Use Matplotlib and Seaborn to visualize data.

  • Perform statistical (regression) analysis to gain insights from the data and draw relevant conclusions.