Selected data relevant for empirical macro economic research

The list was gathered primarily for the seminar Fundamental determinants of economic performance, but is useful also for bachelor projects and master theseses.

The datasets mostly span the entire globe, but in I also supervise projects using various country-specific datasets.

 

General data

This cross-country dataset has many variables on gdp per capita, culture, institutions also across time: http://qog.pol.gu.se/data

A mix of great data: https://sites.google.com/site/medevecon/development-economics/devecondata

And here: http://www.nber.org/data/

Two other datasets:

    Ethnographic Atlas (including the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample): Data gathered by ethnographers on 1265 pre-historic societies (societal complexity, beliefs in God, social stratification, democratization, etc). You need to cite Murdock when using these data. More information here. Documentation here and description of some of the geographic variables can be found in my Irrigation and Autocracy paper.

    Country_data. A dataset where I gathered many variables from my previous projects. Description of some of the variables can be found in my Irrigation and Autocracy paper.

Culture

World Values Survey (WVS): http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

European Values Study (EVS): http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/

Geography

Data aggregated to the country level: https://www.pdx.edu/econ/country-geography-data

Institutions

Polity IV Project (democracy measures etc.): http://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html

Quality of Governance Database: http://qog.pol.gu.se/data

Economic outcomes

Across countries (Penn World Tables): http://www.rug.nl/research/ggdc/data/pwt/pwt-8.1

Across subnational districts in Europe: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database

Across pixels (GDP): http://gecon.yale.edu/

Across pixels (lights at night): See GIS data. Note that you can do analysis across pixels without using ArcGIS programming. It's just another unit of analysis than countries.

GIS data (you need the ArcGIS to handle this - ask me)

Lights visible from space: http://ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html

         What you download is a tar file, which has to be unzipped with winrar (not winzip). Then you unzip again the stable_lights file also with winrar.

Country borders, subnational district borders, roads, railways, rivers, ocean: Naturalearth.com

Population data (register for free note that 2015 and 2020 are predicted data): http://beta.sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v4/sets/browse

Lots of data on temperature, precipitation, soil quality etc: http://gaez.fao.org/Main.html#

         You need to registrer (free) > click on the map and download as zip. Data is .tif.

Data on aggregate land suitability (Ramankutty data): http://nelson.wisc.edu/sage/data-and-models/atlas/index.php

Overview of free GIS data: http://freegisdata.rtwilson.com/

Very detailed subnational district borders: http://www.gadm.org/

Infectious diseases:  https://www.pdx.edu/econ/gis-world-geography-datasets

Historic GIS data:

http://www.aag.org/cs/projects_and_programs/historical_gis_clearinghouse/hgis_databases