NC Budget Data and Policy

Project Summary

Artem Streltsov (Masters Economics) and IIT Mechanical Engineering major Vinod Ramakrishnan spent ten weeks exploring North Carolina state budget documents. Working closely with the Budget and Tax Center, part of the North Carolina Justice Center, their goal was to help build a keystone tool that can be used for analysis of the state budget as well as future budget proposals.

Themes and Categories
Public Policy
Data+
Year
2016

Project Results

The team used the statistical programming language R to transform publicly-available state budget documents from a very awkward .pdf file format into an analyzable data frame. They then used Tableau to construct a data visualization tool capable of simulating the effect of proposed policy changes on past, present, and future budget allocations.

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Faculty Lead: Paul Bendich

Client: Budget and Tax Center, North Carolina Justice Center

Project Manager: Tyler Ransom, post-doc, SSRI

Participants:

  • Artem Streltsov, Master's student in Economics
  • Vinod Ramakrishnan, Indian Institute of Technology

"It was really wonderful experience for me. And, especially this foreign exposure only at the end of my sophomore year is a huge confidence booster. All the projects were interesting and it was awesome to work in a productive and collaborative environment." Vinod Ramakrishnan, Indian Institute of Technology

Disciplines Involved

  • Public Policy
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • All quantitative STEM

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