This is another (and probably the last) in our series of posts by PhD students on the job market – and one that is very close to home for those of us working in DC!
Co-authors and I are soon to complete (fingers crossed) some new work on climatic shocks and neo-natal mortality. But our findings are not the topic of this post. Rather I want to discuss the necessary behind-the-scenes data construction work that had to take place before the first regression could be estimated. The work involved the aggregation of fifty plus national level microdata sets (from Demographic and Health Surveys) and then a merger with geo-coded historical weather data (from NOAA).
