Thursday, April 18, 2013

In Praise of Quandl!

Data - the econometrician's life-blood! Can't function without it.

So, when a new source of data becomes available - especially one that's sophisticated, reliable, and FREE - it's time to sit up and take notice. Quandl is a recent Canadian start-up that delivers economic and financial time-series data, and then some.

It's an interesting business model. When you go to Quandl, you link to the original sources of the data, you know when the data were last updated, and you get some basic graphical analysis before you download the numbers. 

If you're an R, MATLAB, ........... user, it's a breeze to import the data and get busy with the analysis. I've tried out the associated R package, and it's just great. As you can probably tell - I'm hooked!

I can see myself using Quandl a lot for teaching purposes, as well as for my research, and I suspect that my students will be equally enthusiastic.


© 2013, David E. Giles