Note#1: Because these problem sets are only available one week before the due date, there will be two hours of office hours on Sunday afternoon, Tuesday evening and Thursday evening.

Sunday (Feb 8): Harvard Hall: 3-5pm

Tuesday (Feb 10): Sever Hall: 6-8pm

Thursday (Feb 12): Sever Hall: 6-8pm

Note#2: If you run into an issue with this problem set (or find anything unclear), please email me. If you are confused, you are almost surely not the only one. Reaching out will let me make necessary “updates” to the problem set.

Motivation

There are a lot of indicators in the news that we are in a housing shortage. We read that housing prices have increased by 50% from 2019. That, for almost 20 years, the country has not been building enough homes, and it is now short by as many as seven million units. We also read the people differ in their estimates of how large the shortage is, from numbers as low as 2 million to as high as 20 million (WSJ, Washington Post). In this problem set, we’re going to get some experience working with census data to construct our own measure of the housing shortage.

Data Collection

Question #1: Data Collection

We’re going to download the data from ipums. To do so, we need to (1) Select Variables (2) Select a Sample and then (3) Create the Data Extract

• Select Variables
• Select Samples
• Data Extract

Computer Setup

I would recommend tackling this problem set using R-markdown. If you’ve never used it before, consider coming to office hours for help.

Question #2: Setup Your Computer

• Set your working directory to the folder where you’ve downloaded the dataset
• Install packages
• Load packages
• R-version

Data Analysis

Question #3: Process the Data

• Read in the dataset.
• View the first couple of rows
• Print the number of observations in the dataset.