Bas Machielsen

About me: I am an economist interested in economic history and political economy. My research combines archival research, econometric methods, historical insights and economic theory to investigate the influence of personal wealth on voting behavior and the private returns to politics. I also work on the drivers of democratization, the effects of workers’ mobilization on politicians and electorates in the Netherlands, and the effects of religious schooling. I also love methodology, data science, deep learning, statistics, programming and web design. Over time, I created and maintain a number of R and Python packages, which are available here.

My background: My PhD is in economic history from Utrecht University, but I come from a true multidisciplinary background: I was trained in economics at the Tinbergen Institute and in history at the Posthumus Institute. I also have MSc degrees in Economics (Radboud University) and Finance (University of Twente).

This website shows some of my present work, and serves as a pathway to several data repositories and guides that I have written. It will also serve as an access point to Course Material that I provide. I write a blog post every once in a while, about things that interest me. Sometimes, these posts are more of a reminder to myself about how to do something. I guess these will be mostly data-related, but feel free to browse around for anything. Some of the more recent posts are shown below.