Uses

There are a lot of good ways to conduct and organize work as an empirical researcher. Since I regularly discuss these choices with others I thought it is helpful to write down my choices (even though the whole thing is less fancy than what others do). As of February 2025 I use the following things:

Producing Research

• During a short stint in the private sector I realized that while using Stata has many advantages (simple, stable), one does not have easy access to it outside academia. Since I want to be able to do my research independent of employers, I decided to do all my research projects in R unless there is really no other way (looking at you, Statistical Offices of Germany and Denmark).

• I use Quarto in RStudio to weave together text, graphs and tables for my final research outputs (slides, paper, reports). We have put together the zewwwwEcon package that provides templates to easily produce reproducible research projects.

• I use either GitHub or Gitea (hosted directly at ZEW) to keep track of code (for myself or in teams).

Consuming Research

• I subscribe to new paper alerts for the journals and discussion paper series that cover my research areas. These emails are automatically marked as read and put in a dedicated folder. I then go through these emails whenever I feel like I have time (train rides are ideal to skim through abstracts!).

• I use Zotero to manage my literature. While I sync my private library to Dropbox, I donate some money to have larger storage for shared groups.

Productivity

• We use Stackfield for project and task management since this is what ZEW uses.

• I track my work time using clockify and look at how I spent my time at the end of each year. I think it is more important how one spends their time instead of how much (in particular: Do not work 80 hours a week).

Homepage

• This homepage is hosted on GitHub and runs with jekyll. The tutorial which I still use whenever I change this site is here.

Hardware

• I have a MacBook for work.

• I sometimes spin up a virtual machines for larger computations but probably should do this more often.

• I use an e-Ink tablet for reading papers and taking notes.