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+

Project Results

The team used the statistical programming language R to transform publically-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.

Download Executive Summary (PDF)

Video

 

Client

Project Manager

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

Related People

Related Projects

Maximizing Data Communication for Faster Energy Access

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 calls for universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy. Researchers and practitioners around the world have responded to this call by producing a wealth of energy access data. While many data gaps still exist, are we capturing the fullest potential from the information and research we do have, and what it tells us about how to accelerate energy access? Power for All’s Platform for Energy Access Knowledge (PEAK) is an interactive knowledge platform designed to automatically curate, organize, and streamline large, growing bodies of data into digestible, sharable, and useable knowledge through automated data capture, indexing, and visualization. A team of students led by Rebekah Shirley will consult with Power for All to creatively visualize PEAK’s library, and to explore machine learning and natural language processing tools that can enable auto-extraction and visualization of data for more effective science communication.

Data and the Global Corporate Bond Market

Are there relative value opportunities in the global corporate bond markets?  
A team of students will work with Professor Emma Rasiel to understand whether an analysis of credit spreads on bonds issued by international firms in multiple countries over time can shed light on potential arbitrage opportunities. The team will have frequent opportunities to interact with analytics professionals at a leading financial advisory and asset management firm.

 

Construction Machinery and the Business Cycle

A team of students will consult with a leading financial advisory and asset management firm that is seeking to understand how big data can shed light on the secondary market for construction machinery. Students will explore a combination of publicly-available datasets that describe the used-machinery market and its potential implications as an indicator for the business cycle. There will be frequent interactions with analytical professionals from the firm.