FinancialCrisisFiles {Ecdat}

Files containing financial crisis data

Description

FinancialCrisisFiles is an object of class financialCrisisFiles created by the financialCrisisFiles function in Ecfun. It describes files containing data on financial crises downloadable from https://web.archive.org/web/20150419090824/http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/data/browse-by-topic/topics/7.

NOTE: When this dataset was created it was downloaded from http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/data/browse-by-topic/topics/7. However, it was "Not Found" in testing on 2020-02-09. Fortunately the data are still available on the Internet Archive.

Usage

data(FinancialCrisisFiles)

Details

Reinhart and Rogoff (http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com) provide numerous data sets analyzed in their book, "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly". Of interest here are data on financial crises of various types for 70 countries spanning the years 1800 - 2010, downloadable from http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/data/browse-by-topic/topics/7/.

Version 0.2-3 of the Ecfun package included a function financialCrisisFiles that produced a list of class financialCrisisFiles describing four different Excel files in very similar formats with one sheet per Country and a few extra descriptor sheets. This data object FinancialCrisisFiles was produced by that function. That function required the gdata package, and users of that package were advised to terminate use of it, because it was scheduled to be removed from CRAN along with all packages that used it. Since Reinhart and Rogoff seemed not to be actively maintaining that dataset, there seemed little need to do the work required to make the Ecfun::financialCrisisFiles work without gdata, so it was removed from Ecfun version 2.0-4.

Value

FinancialCrisisFiles is a list with components carrying the names of files to be read. Each component is a list of optional arguments to pass to do.call(read.xls, ...) to read the sheet with name = name of that component. (This read.xls was part of the gdata package, which may no longer be available on CRAN.)

This corresponds to the files downloaded from http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/data/browse-by-topic/topics/7/ in January 2013 (except for the fourth, which was not available there because of an error with the web site but instead was obtained directly from Prof. Reinhart).

Author(s)

Spencer Graves

Source

http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com

References

Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (2009) This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton U. Pr.