Our thanks

We could not have done is alone. Far from it. So, we are grateful, really.

Learning from our students

Let us first thank our students at the Central European University, at the University of Michigan, and at the University of Reading. The idea of writing a textbook was born out of teaching and mentoring them. We have learned a lot from teaching them, and many of them helped us writing code, collecting data, reading papers, and hunting for ideas.

Advice from Colleagues

Many colleagues helped us with their extremely valuable comments and suggestions. We thank Eduardo Arino de la Rubia, Emily Blanchard, Imre Boda, Alberto Cairo, Gergely Daróczi, János Divényi, Christian Fons-Rosen, Bonnie Kavoussi, Olivér Kiss, Miklós Koren, Mike Luca, Róbert Lieli, László Mátyás, Tímea Laura Molnár, Arieda Muço, Jenő Pál, and Ádám Szeidl and anonymous reviewers of the first draft of the textbook.

Help on case studies

We have received help with our case studies from Alberto Cavallo, Daniella Scur, Nick Bloom, John van Reenen, Anikó Kristof, József Keleti, Emily Oster, and MyChelle Andrews. We have learned a lot from them.

Editing, text development

Several people helped us a great deal with our manuscript. At Cambridge University Press, our commissioning editor, Phil Good, encouraged us from the day we met. Our editors, Heather Brolly, Jane Adams, and Nicola Chapman, guided us with kindness and steadfastness from first draft to proofs. We are not native English speakers, and support from Chris Cartwrigh and Jon Billam was very useful.

We are grateful for Sarolta Rózsás, who read and edited endless versions of chapters, checking consistency and clarity, and pushed us to make the text more coherent and accessible.

The wonderful cover design is based on the work by Ágoston Nagy, his first but surely not his last.

Coding, translations across scripting languages

Zsuzsa Holler and Kinga Ritter have provided enormous development support, spearheading this effort for years.

Additional code and refactoring in R was created by Máté Tóth, János Bíró, and Eszter Pázmándi. János and Máté also created the first version of Python notebooks. Later on Ádám Víg joined in. Ádám also worked on the kinks of this website.

Additional coding, data collection, visualization, and editing were done by Viktória Kónya, Zsófia Kőműves, Dániel Bánki, Abuzar Ali, Endre Borza, Imola Csóka, and Ahmed Al Shaibani.

After the publication, new folks came to help, especially regarding the Pythpn code: Péter Duronelly, Ágoston Reguly who also created the blueprint for coding courses.

The community help

Let us also shout out to the fantastic R user community – both online and offline – from whom we learned tremendously. Special thanks to the Rstats and Econ Twitter community – we received wonderful suggestions from tons of people we have never met.

CEU backing

We thank the Central European University for professional and financial support. Julius Horvath and Miklós Koren as department heads provided massive support from the day we shared our plans.

Family

Finally, let us thank those who were with us throughout the long, and often stressful, process of writing a textbook. Békés thanks Saci; Kézdi thanks Zsuzsanna. We would not have been able to do it without their love and support.