Category: Graphics

A few weeks ago, we showed you how to create a detailed plot from a recent article in the American Economic Review. That article contained several plots that contain quite a bit of similar and stylized formatting. Today we will show you how to efficiently create two of these graphs. Our main goals are to get you thinking about code reuse and how it can help you:

• Get more results from your limited research time.
• Avoid the frustration that comes from growing mountains of spaghetti code.

Often times we need to mix multiple graph types in order to create a plot which most effectively tells the story of our data. In this post, we will create a plot of the Phillips Curve in the United States over two separate time periods. We will show how to add scatter points and lines as well as data series’ of different lengths to a single plot. However, our main focus will be showing you how to control the styling of all aspects of the plot in these cases.