Microdata Analysis Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on Farmer Household Income and Labor Mobility in Indonesia

Research Assistance

My Job Description

Using STATA, I assist PhD students in analyzing microdata from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to assess the impact of climate change on farmer household income and labor mobility in Indonesia. This involves cleaning and preparing data and running statistical analyses.

Lessons Learned

STATA vs R

I’m an R fanboy even though STATA was the first statistical software I learned. The first challenge that I faced was the documentation. Even AI (LLM) can’t fix errors in STATA code. This type of license is not open source, so I cannot access the documentation freely. I have to rely on the official documentation and some online resources, which are not as comprehensive as R’s documentation. This makes it harder to find solutions to specific problems or errors in my code.

The second challenge is the syntax, which is different from R. So my trick for cleaning data is to use R and then export the data to STATA. I essentially just use STATA for modeling.