donut-effect

Replication code for "The Donut Effect of Covid-19 on Cities" by Arjun Ramani and Nicholas Bloom. Click here for the most recent draft of our working paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28876/w28876.pdf

Replication file instructions

This repository contains all data and scripts necessary to replicate the figures and tables found in the paper. You may need R version 3.6.2 or later to successfully run.

Creating all figures and tables from intermediate datasets

To replicate all figures and tables using intermediate data stored in the data folder, run:

• all_R_figures.R to create all figures that use R
• all_stata_figures.do to create all figures that use Stata
• tables.R to create all regression tables

Creating intermediate datasets (used to create figures and tables)

Some of the datasets used in this process must be downloaded from various locations. To ease this process, we have stored each of these datasets in the data/external_data folder. The locations of all datasets can be found in the files inside the scripts folder. To create the intermediate datasets used for the figures and tables from scratch, run

• create_all_datasets.R to create the Zillow and USPS datasets
  • create_all_datasets.R has a dependency on zip_bus_patterns.R which sources from scripts/census-api.R. You must obtain a Census API key from https://www.census.gov/data/developers/guidance/api-user-guide.html and store the key in scripts/census-api.R by including a line as follows: key = "INSERT_YOUR_KEY_HERE

Branches

• nber-wp contains code for the original May 2021 version of the NBER working paper
• main contains code for the updated version of the paper (in-progress)