Economic research requires writing documents, and often writing code. How can economists avoid drowning in a mess of different versions? How can they keep everything organized, and keep track of the changes they made? How can coauthors work constructively on the same set of files without going crazy?

These slides introduce economists to version control and Git. They focus on the reasons to use version control (including why Dropbox doesn’t suffice) and the basic concepts of Git, and feature some examples using GitKraken. The goal: getting started with the basics and learning more as you get more comfortable.

This presentation does not cover advanced Git features, or even Git’s command line interface. For that, I recommend Jesús Fernández-Villaverde’s notes.

This presentation was originally delivered on 22 February 2019, to an audience of graduate students at Harvard. It accompanied LJ Ristovska’s presentation on programming for economists.

Slides: Git for Economists

Of course, these slides also have a GitHub repo.