Stata program for merging U.S. county identifiers.

The Urban Institute has released a new package for mapping state and county data in R, urbnmapr. Their posts can be found here and here. Since I occasionally write about how to make simple maps in R, I am going to quickly go from start to finish on making a county map.

Ever so often, I teach public finance to graduate students. I have found for many topics it helps to motivate them by providing some “real world” examples (sidenote: I hate that term). Last Week Tonight with John Oliver provides many such examples, presented in a let’s say unique way. He’s gotten very close to cover nearly every topic I would want to cover. I have tried to lay them out in a coherent way. Enjoy!

In a conversation with a few colleagues, the question came up of which states collect public finance data on their respective local governments. Over the years, I have been keeping a list of such resources just in case I might want/need to use the data for a project. It dawned on me that I probably should not be hoarding this resource.