New Stata Data Repository

From Alex Tabarrok at MR:

Even when every dataset is nicely formatted and documented it can be time consuming to merge two or more datasets when, for example, they use different identifiers for countries.

Giulia Catini, Ugo Panizza and Carol Saade have started a Macro Data 4 Stata repository which collects and creates common identifiers for the Penn World Tables, Barro and Lee's Educational data, the World Bank's Development Indicators and about 20 other datasets commonly used in macroeconomics. Any dataset in the repository can be merged with any other with just a couple of standard commands.

Check it out and please do add your own data!

This seems like it's going to be a great tool for data searching and merging from a wide range of datasets. The repository is being built using STATA 10 and 11 so if you don't have a realtively recent version of the software, you'll have to track one down.

Markets in Everything: Dates edition - 35th of May

One of my favorite running features on MarginalRevolution.com, an economics and culture blog run by George Mason University professors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, is "Markets in Everything" where they discuss the presence of markets for random and typically pretty insane things. I'm stealing the concept for one quick post:

As Will posted earlier, today is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that took place on June 4th, 1989. However, in China, all references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and today's date June 4th, have been censored throughout the country. Any reference to this date on the internet in China is being blocked (I'm sure this blog is already blocked in China now that we have posted twice about the massacre).

Chinese bloggers and internet users, however, have created a clever little way to evade this censorship by using May 35th, instead of June 4th, as a reference to the massacre when seeking to write about this major incident. Just goes to show the ingenuity of these bloggers and the rise of a market for a 35th day in the month of May.