iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Last minute semester prep and I find this paper. Adding to my slides ASAP!

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

A quote that I think is particularly relevant in thinking about AI doing writing for us. From Deirdre McCloskey's brilliant Economical Writing www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Art...

0152

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Another day, another DID paper review where the authors "randomize treatment across locations" as a robustness check. *Sigh*

240

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Anyone want to see what a DID "paper mill" I've discovered while refereeing?

130

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

TIL you can calculate the mean and the variance in one pass through a vector 🤯 Really nice article showing how: nullbuffer.com/articles/wel...

nullbuffer.com

Numerically stable algorithm for computing the running mean

020

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Come be a razorback! We are hiring two positions this year at the U of Arkansas! Macro/General Equilibrium: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Applied Micro: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Northwest Arkansas is consistently ranked one of the best places to live. Here's some highlights!

295

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Does anyone have really good examples of a github repository for a research paper. Trying to get good examples for a lesson I'm giving

782

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

github.com/kylebutts/vs... If you are using vscode and stata, you should try out my extension. It uses interactive window which let's you write in a `.do` file but get a notebook type experience.

14816

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

The answer is all 0s !!! what a frustrating choice !!!!

010

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Stata quiz. what do you think the output of `tab` will be? ``` sysuse auto, replace reg mpg i.rep78 if rep78 == 2, nocons predict xb tab xb if rep78 != 2 ```

110

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

kylebutts.com/blog/2025-04... A short blog post for efficient stats coding. All about the importance of dimensionality when doing matrix operations ft. 100x speed-up of my code

kylebutts.com

Kyle Butts

Kyle Butts -- Urban Economics and Applied Econometrics

061

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

TIL how to download census data (www2.census.gov) super simply. Finder: Go > Connect to Server > ftp://ftp2.census.gov/. Login as guest and 🤯

1246

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

R tip: If you run code but forget to save it in a variable, you can use `.Last.value` in the console. More, if you want to copy the result to your clipboard, use `clipr::write_last_clip`:

2130

Reposted by Kyle Butts

Achim Zeileis @zeileis.org · 24/02/2025

🚨 The "penguins" data is coming to the base #rstats{datasets} in 4.5.0! @ellakaye.co.uk & @HeathrTurnr.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy r prepared an adapted and a raw version of the data set based on the {palmerpenguins} 📦 by @allisonhorst.bsky.social @apreshill.com and Kristen Gorman. 📈 Scatter plot:

Scatter plot of bill depth vs. length by species (color) and sex (symbol). It shows positive correlations for all species with males tending to have bigger bills than females.

sym <- c(1, 16)
pal <- c("darkorange","purple","cyan4")
plot(bill_dep ~ bill_len, data = penguins, pch = sym[sex], col = pal[species])

611835

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Quick tip: If you store a pdf on GitHub, like this: github.com/kylebutts/Ge... You can make an easy to view link by replacing `github.com/` with `nbviewer.org/github/` and it looks like this: nbviewer.org/github/kyleb...

github.com

3426

Reposted by Kyle Butts

eli yudin @eliyudin.com · 03/01/2025

You can tell companies’ AI projects are going really well because every app is bait-and-switching their most commonly pressed button with something called like “Answers By Glorp” to get people to even accidentally use it

152331586

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

judge: “so you said the true vote share is in this interval 95% of the time? how could that be true if the true vote share is not in that interval”

140

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Working on a new R package. Looking for applications that do two things: 1. DID with y to show an effect 2. DID with X to show a possible “mechanism” of why treatment changed y This could be a published paper or a paper you're working on (that I might help make "fancier" / cooler !!)

162

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

Is there a better sign of AI hype than MICROSOFT creating a package to convert docx/pptx -> md USING CHAT GPT ????https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

260

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Now would be a great time for overleaf users (my coauthors) to delete their account and stop making me use the bad web app

150

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Working on my applied metrics course; Here are my figures using Ashenfelter's dip (1978 paper)

170

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 16/02/2024

In Judge FE style settings, how many observations are usually available per judge? Is there ever settings with few number of observations?

012

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 24/01/2024

Been formalizing a lot of my workflow into R packages. Today, I have added `tikzsave` to `kfbmisc` package for making figures: ggplot() -> tikzpicture -> pre-compiled into pdf (using latex themes) gist.github.com/kylebutts/9c...

Source code that creates an example figure using `ggplot2` and latex math notation and the corresponding output

140

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/12/2023

Metrics question: I have a simple regression: y_i = \beta x_i + u_i y_i is an estimated quantity from a survey and I have the standard error on that estimate. What's the "correct" way to upweight observations with small standard errors?

200

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 11/12/2023

R Tip: if you have are doing some piping and want to make a quick plot or table, use base R's `with` function (`within` is great too!)

010

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 08/12/2023

WIP: Write R scripts like you normally do and have them automagically turn into a git-friendly log book that you can share with your coauthors using quarto html: kylebutts.github.io/repro_project/ md: github.com/kylebutts/re...

0112

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 30/11/2023

The #1 best piece of coding advice is whenever you think "oh that's kind of a clever solution", put it into a function. Makes using code from past projects way easier

260

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 02/11/2023

Chris Walter's Mixtape Session on Empirical Bayes methods is next week! I developed this app to build intuition on linear shrinkage estimators (on simulated school value-added data) Shiny app: mixtape.shinyapps.io/Linear-Shrin... More info on the course: www.mixtapesessions.io/session/empi...

082

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Delighted by this really well-made interactive site about all different probability distributions: www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~adamcunn/pr...

33912

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

While prepping my JMP slides, I've made some pretty cool updates to my latex slides template: - color rows/cells (with reveal options) - bottom left beamer buttons: \bottomleft{} - customize theme colors(!) - full-size figures: \imageframe{} github.com/kylebutts/la...

3539

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

I'm unreasonably excited about the \bottomleft{\beamerbutton{}} trick I've added to my latex-slides template. Look how nice they are down there!! github.com/kylebutts/te...

2368

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 12/10/2023

New package `fwlplot` is ready to be tried out by some volunteers! This is a 1:1 drop-in replacement for `feols` but instead produces a scatter plot of residualized y on residualized x (first x-var in formula). Works with fixest multi features, e.g. github.com/kylebutts/fw...

Example output from `fwlplot`. The picture is a grid of plots with a different outcome variable for each row and a different sample for each column

1113

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 12/10/2023

Really great timing for this R&R 🥳

0140

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 04/10/2023

Does anyone have a way of citing working papers in .bib that they think works well? I sort of just do whatever google scholar does..

121

Kyle Butts @kylefbutts.bsky.social · 02/10/2023

Hi all! I'm Kyle at CU Boulder in the Economics department (and a job market candidate !!). I mostly tweet about my papers and my open source software/resources. I'll start off with a bsky exclusive. All the pdf slides from NBER methods lectures back to 2007: github.com/kylebutts/nb...

github.com

GitHub - kylebutts/nber_methods_lecture_slides: Slides from NBER Methods Lecture (extracted from the...

Slides from NBER Methods Lecture (extracted from the Wayback Machine) - GitHub - kylebutts/nber_methods_lecture_slides: Slides from NBER Methods Lecture (extracted from the Wayback Machine)

312534