Open Source Economics

A platform for reproducible research with modern tools

Our group focuses on three main problems: How do we organize a research workflow in a reproducible and efficient way? How can we utilize methods developed in one project across multiple projects? And how can we implement research software in an extensible fashion?

We thus develop software of various kinds. On this site we group it into

1. General Purpose Tools. Our most developed package is optimagic, a library for non-linear optimization with or without constraints. Other helpful tools forming the basis of many of our projects are pybaum and dags.
2. Workflow Tools. The basis of our projects is reproducibility. Often researchers hijack build systems for this. However, these are not designed for the typical research workflow and are thus inefficient. pytask provides an alternative, a workflow management system inspired by pytest. Newcomers can migrate their project to our workflow tools using the econ-project-templates or for more experienced users the bare cookiecutter-pytask-project template.
3. Economic Models and Applications. We provide numerous packages that solve certain types of models. Examples are life-cycle models (lcm), dynamic latent factor models (skillmodels) and actual applications, for example, contact models in the context of covid (sid).

Locally and virtually, we organize events and teach courses on effective programming practices.

Contact

               

Reach out on Zulip, follow us on Twitter and check out our GitHub.

               

We gratefully acknowledge funding by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW) as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments, via TRA Modelling.