README.md

In weiyangtham/econothemes: NBER-inspired theme for ggplot

A collection of ggplot themes and geoms loosely based on an economics theme. I'd love to hear if you've found any of these helpful or have suggestions. I'm also active on twitter. Currently the package consists of:

1. An NBER theme inspired by the NBER's Reporter and Digest.

2. geom_errorline: a geom for upper and lower bounds of an interval, with the points of the upper bound as a separate line from the points of the lower bound.

Install

devtools::install_github("weiyangtham/econothemes")

geom_errorline

There are many circumstances where you want to plot a line and also show some intervals around the line, such as confidence intervals. In economics you’ll see this most often in an event study or difference-in-differences, where you have coefficients for each time period before and after a treatment date. There are a number of ways to do this. For example, you can have an error bar for each coefficient.

library(tidyverse)
library(econothemes)

df <- data_frame(b = c(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1.5, 1.7, 1.8), 
           year = -4:4)

p <- ggplot(df, aes(year, b, ymax = b + 0.2, ymin = b - 0.2)) + geom_line() 

p + geom_errorbar(linetype = 2)

Another way you could represent this is to give the upper bounds and lower bounds as their own lines. This can give a cleaner look than error bars if there is a series of coefficients over a long time period. This is what geom_errorline does.

p + geom_errorline(linetype = 2) + labs(title = "geom_errorline")

Note that this is the equivalent of

p + 
  geom_line(aes(y = b + 0.2), linetype = 2) +
  geom_line(aes(y = b - 0.2), linetype = 2)

NBER theme

ggplot2 theme inspired by the NBER's Reporter and Digest.

The relevant functions are theme_nber(), scale_color_nber(), and scale_fill_nber().

Note that the scales draw on a palette with only two colors. The NBER typically uses a sequential palette of different shades of blue, which doesn't work so well with more than two values. If you want to stay true to that style, you can try building a sequential palette with ColorBrewer or using the RColorBrewer package.

Example

library(gapminder)
# library(tidyverse)
# library(econothemes)

df <- filter(gapminder, country %in% c("United States", "United Kingdom"))

ggplot(df, aes(year, lifeExp, color = country)) + 
  geom_line() + 
  theme_nber() + 
  scale_colour_nber() + 
  labs(title = "Life Expectancy in US and UK", 
       subtitle = "theme_nber() example", 
       caption = "Source: Gapminder")

weiyangtham/econothemes documentation built on May 6, 2019, 9:55 a.m.