Hi, and welcome to my website! I am a PhD student in Economics at Stanford University. My research interests are in macroeconomics and finance.
Prior to Stanford I completed undergradate and masters degrees at Trinity College Dublin and was an economic consultant at Frontier Economics London.
You can reach me at higginsb[at]stanford[dot]edu.
Data science portfolio
Here is a sample of my work and code related to data science. It highlights:
- Data visualizations from work-in-progress at Stanford;
- A project using GPU computing to solve and estimate economic models;
- Data visualizations from work prior to Stanford.
1. Data visualizations from work-in-progress at Stanford
Mortgage borrowing limits and house prices: evidence from a policy change in Ireland.
This paper studies a policy change that capped the maximum loan-to-income ratio for borrowers in Ireland, and estimates its impact on consumer borrowing and aggregate house prices. This plot illustrates that the policy change is binding, as the distribution is bunched at 3.5 after the policy change (2018), whereas during prior booms (2006) mortgage leverage was much higher.
- Plot created with Stata Code (.do)
- Paper
- Slides
Consumption and Savings responses to persistent income shocks.
(joint with Terry O’Malley and Fang Yao)
This paper uses confidential bank and mortgage data to study how consumers adjust savings and consumption in response to large and persistent income shocks. This figure plots the disposable income shock that occured following a divergence in the two main types of variable rate mortgages in Ireland in 2010. The shock is large and grows over time.
- Created with Stata, code/slides have not yet been approved for sharing by Central Bank of Ireland.
A network approach to segmented housing markets.
(joint with Boaz Abramson)
- Created with Python and Jupyter Notebook (.html) Notebook (.ipynb)
2. GPU computing
On-going work to solve quantitative economic models using high performance computing tools such as GPU parallization. Plot shows the speed improvements for three methods for parallel programming in python.
- Created with python and jupyter Notebook (.html) Notebook (.ipynb)
3. Data visualizations from work prior to Stanford.
The cost of housing near schools report
Report on the impact of schools on the price of housing, written with Ronan Lyons for Ireland’s largest property website Daft.ie.
- Report
- Media: RTE, Irish Times, The Journal
Frontier Economics
Here are some reports I was involved in while at Frontier Economics, London. The plot shows a “candle chart” — a spin on a bar chart for a fun holiday themed report.
