Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

I just updated my Stata do-file for standardizing country names (see earlier post here ). The main update is that I've added World Values Survey country codes. The do-file now lives at its own Git here . I hope to have an R version of this in the near future. (I still like using data to merge together large cross-country data sets. For example, the full World Values Survey is a bit unwieldy in R.) Update 20 February 2012: I just ran across Vincent Arel-Bundock 's countrycode package for R. I haven't tried it out yet, but from reading the documentation it looks like countrycode does pretty much what my do-file does, but better, e.g. it includes more country coding schemes. Vincent Arel-Bundock is also the author of another R package I really like, WDI . WDI makes it easy to grab World Bank Indicators . I've used it a number of times in post for this blog.

Here are the slides from a presentation I'm giving at Waseda University this weekend. The presentation is based on a paper I wrote with Mícheál O'Keeffe on how policymakers choose responses to banking crises. We specifically look at South Korea and Ireland. It uses the unofficial LSE beamer class I created. The paper is  here .