Selected Projects in Data Science and Econometrics

Estimating the Cost of Regulatory Accumulation: US States’ Age as Identification Strategy

I’m writing a paper with Dr. Patrick McLaughlin on using state age to create an exogenous variation in regulatory accumulation. This project leverages QuantGov’s State RegData.

Web Scraper for Subsidized Housing Transaction Data

The Housing Authority’s data on subsidized housing transactions is notoriously difficult to access as the data must be requested by month, each with a separate web form. So I developed a scraper that automatically submits forms and gathers transaction count in each month into one spreadsheet.

Built with Python and Selenium. Check it out here: https://github.com/johnthwong/housing-authority-scraper

What Is the Cause of Interest Rate Volatility in Interbank Markets?

I demonstrate in this analysis that contrary to conventional wisdom, interest rate volatility isn’t caused by liquidity crunches subsequent to initial public offerings. Read more

When HIBOR (red) Breaches the Base Rate (blue)

Visualization of the Hong Kong’s Forex Reserves

After a drop in the balances of accounts held at the central bank by commercial banks (aka “Aggregate Balance”) in the summer of 2022, there was panic that Hong Kong’s currency peg with the USD would break. In response, I wrote an internal report on why “Aggregate Balance” is insignificant and not worth freaking out about.

This project uses the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s JSON API. Data manipulation and visualization are done with R’s dplyr and ggplot libraries.

Check out a similar coding file that generated the visualization below here: https://github.com/johnthwong/hkma

Give US Public Housing Residents the Right to Buy Their Flat

I recently wrote a policy memo for the Federation of American Scientists’ call for federal policy ideas for increasing housing supply. By selling public housing units, we can unlock currently non-transferrable land value, increase homeownership, create new wealth that accrues to the poor, improve state and local public finances, free up units under the Faircloth Limit, and most of all, increase housing supply. Read more

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash