Old Material is Below here. Some good Stuff, but Mostly about MapWindow GIS.

Welcome! This is where I will index all of the files and videos for the Spatial Econometrics Course. FILES are linked to the left (<----See Files).

I do not charge for anything here. Also, where possible, all of the files and programs we use here will be free. If we will use a program or data that is not free, I will explicitly point this out. Otherwise, assume it is free! Click on the underlined link (like Intro Video 0:) to watch each video.

Old Download Links

Download the handout, US State/Territory Map and World Map from the Files Section on the left side (or click the links on the words)

Link to Download MapWindow (free GIS program)

Link to Download LibreOffice Portable (Free Office Suite)

Link To Download US Map Used (free SHP files of the US states)

Link to Download 2010 US County Map (free SHP of US 2010 Counties)

Link to Download World Map (free World SHP file)

Link To Download 7Zip (Free compression program to open ZIP, 7z, and other compressed archives. The first .exe link should work for Windows Users)

Introduction and Overview:

Intro Video 0: About the project (Beginning information about my plans for the course and what I hope to cover))

Intro Video 1: An overview of Spatial Econometrics and Spatial Econometric Models (A broad overview of the major spatial econometric models, Lag, Error, Kelejian-Prucha, Durbin, Manski, SLX)

Basic GIS Tools: with MapWindow (Open Source, very similar to ArcGIS):

Requirements: MapWindow, LibreOffice, US Map, World Map, Income Data (from Census Bureau)

GIS One: Basic GIS Tricks. (I called this "Video 2" in the video itself!) How to open maps (.SHP files) by adding and manipulating layers, edit them to remove unwanted areas, and save the new edited shapefile as a new file.

GIS Two: Data and Data Maps. Adding External Data to an existing SHP file and making Chloropleth Maps. This is very tedious, and there are easier ways... but I teach you a couple of slow and dirty ways to get it done.

Link to Income Data Excel File

GIS Two-B: Better Ways of Getting Data In. I told you that there were some better ways of getting data in, so here are two of them. Sorting, and using the "Swift-D" plugin.

GIS Three: Map Labels and Layouts. Here we label the states, and work with print layouts to make a pretty map with proper legends, titles, etc.

GIS Four: Census Geographies. Here we learn about census tracts, block groups, blocks, counties, MSAs, ZCTAs, congressional districts voting districts, school districts, lakes, metropolitan and micropolitan areas... Download link for free maps is below.

Census 2010 SHP Download Page

GIS Five: Importing and Mapping Points. Here we import a large number of points (population weighted block group centroids) from a CSV file, and add them to our map.

Link to download block group centroids

GIS Six: How to Determine and Export Longitude and Latitude of Centroids:

Here we take our shapefile of the world's countries and create center points, and export this data to a CSV file, and bring them into Excel.

GIS Seven: Matching Data and Mapping County Rural-Urban Continuum Codes. Here we map all US Counties with their 2013 Rural Urban Continuum Codes, creating a new variable in our map to match on.

Download Link for Original USDA-ERS Rural Urban Code Data

Download Link for my "Cleaned" USDA-ERS Rural Urban Code Data

Download Census SHP File of All US Counties

GIS Tricks 1: Making a Mapped Polygon, Finding Intersection and Difference

We create a mappable shape (e.g., hexagon, circle, ellipse), and then find the intersection of two shapefiles, first keeping the intersection, and then cut off the intersection. Lastly, we find the centroids.