Messy Data, Causal Answers, and Software That Ships: Evidence from One Applied Economist

I am an applied economist and data scientist, finishing an M.Sc. in Applied Economics and Data Science in Oldenburg, Germany. I build panels from satellite and administrative data, replicate published results on independently constructed pipelines, and turn the boring parts into tools that run on their own: an R package on CRAN, a retrieval-augmented assistant in production, a monthly data pipeline to Kaggle. Using 1206 GitHub contributions as data, I find that I ship consistently, with a statistically significant drop on weekends (§3). Policy implication: hire me.

JEL codes C23, C55, C87, O18, R11
Keywords causal inference, panel data, GIS, reproducibility, data engineering, RAG

@misc{coban2026hire,
  author       = {\c{C}oban, Furkan},
  title        = {Messy Data, Causal Answers, and Software That Ships},
  howpublished = {\url{https://ofurkan.co}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {Working Paper No. 26-01. Open to work.}
}