Analyzing Financial and Economic Data with R

REVISED edition March 2021

This book introduces the reader to the use of R and RStudio as a platform for analyzing financial and economic data. The book covers all necessary knowledge for using R, from its installation in your computer to the organization and development of scripts. For every chapter, the book presents practical and replicable examples of R code, providing context and facilitating the learning process. This is what you'll learn from this book:

Using R and RStudio: In chapter 01 we will discuss the use of R as a programming platform designed to solve data-related problems in finance and economics. In chapter 02 we will explore basic commands and many functionalities of R and RStudio that will increase your productivity.

Importing financial and economic data: In chapters 04 and 05 we will learn to import data from local files, such as an Excel spreadsheet, or the internet, using specialized packages that can download financial and economic data such as stock prices, economic indices, the US yield curve, corporate financial statements, and many others.

Cleaning, structuring and analyzing the data with R: In chapters 06 and 07 we will concentrate our study on the ecosystem of basic and advanced classes of objects within R. We will learn to manipulate objects such as numeric vectors, dates and whole tables. In chapters 08 and 09 we'll study to use the programming tools to solve data-related problems such as cleaning and structuring messy data. In chapter 11 we will learn applications of the most common econometric models used in finance and economics including linear regression, generalized linear model, Arima model and others.

Creating visual analysis of data: In chapter 10 we'll learn to use functions from package ggplot2 to create clever visualizations of our datasets, including the most popular applications in finance and economics, time series and statistical plots.

Reporting your results: In chapter 12 we will see how to report our data analysis using specialized packages and the RMarkdown technology. Includes the topic of presenting and exporting tables, figure and models to a written report.

Writing better and faster code: In the last chapter of the book we discuss best programming practices with R. We will look at how to profile code and search for bottlenecks, and improving execution time with caching strategies using package memoise, C++ code with Rcpp and parallel computing with furrr.

All the material used in the book, including code examples separated by chapters and exercises is publicly available on the Internet and distributed with a R package called afedR. It includes data files and several functions that can make it easier to run the examples of the book. If you plan to write some code as you read the book, this package will greatly help your journey.

This book is recommended for researchers and students interested in learning how to use R. No prior knowledge of programming, finance or economics is required to take advantage of this book. After finishing, the reader will have enough knowledge to develop their own scripts autonomously, producing academic documents or data analysis for public and private institutions.