Imola Csóka

Economist | Data Scientist | Contact: CsokaI@ceu.edu

I am a Visiting Instructor at the Department of Economics and Business of the Central European University (Vienna) and work as a Data and AI Specialist at Audi Hungaria (Győr). In my research I use applied econometrics to study education and labor economics. Previously, I also participated in data-intensive research projects at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, at the Central European University MicroData research group and at the Corvinus University of Budapest, where I completed my PhD studies.

I am passionate about creating value from data and finding patterns that help to understand the society and businesses. I have been involved in teaching and development of various statistics and coding related courses, and motivated to share my enthusiasm for data analysis with others. You can find my academic CV here.

Research

Working papers

The effect of elite secondary school programs on university outcomes in Hungary
Supervisor: Dániel Horn. The thesis is defended with summa cum laude.

Complete thesis here (99 pages), thesis booklet here (22 pages summary).

Ten simple rules for creating a replication package

With Miklós Koren, Lars Vilhuber, Marie Connolly and Joan Llull.

Ongoing

Gender gap in job advertisements

With Bernhard Schmidpeter and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer.

Losing your female talent: a simulation game of discrimination and data analysis

With Miklós Koren.

Publications

Factors of job satisfaction among young and older workers
With Tamás Szőke.

Paper in Hungarian here. (The extended abstract in English is on the last 2 pages.)

Measurement of scientific performance in Hungarian business and economics higher education
With Gábor Neszveda and Géza Sebestyén.

Paper in Hungarian here.

Middle-income trap in EU regions
With Klára Major.

Poster in English here.

Thesis supervision

Dominika Kocánová (MS Economic and Business Analytics, Johannes Kepler University, 2024): The impact of the liberalization of access for Eastern European workers to the labor market in Austria.

Barbara Tene (BS in Business Informatics, Budapest Business University, 2023): Data visualisation programmes and techniques to demonstrate the extent of environmental pollution.

Teaching

Coding for Economists
MA in Economics, Data, and Policy, Central European University (Instructor)

Content: Programming in Stata and Python, version control with git, introduction to the command line.

2024 fall
Discovering Discrimination with Data
MS Business Analytics, Central European University (Teaching assistant)

2023 winter, 2024 winter
Data Analysis and Economic Methods
BA Business and Economics, Johannes Kepler University (Instructor)

2024 spring
Programming, Data Managament and Visualization
MS Economic and Business Analytics, Johannes Kepler University (Instructor)

Content: advanced concepts in programming using Stata and version control with git. Course outline here.

2023 fall
Data Analytics 1, Data Analytics 2
Executive MBA, Central European University (Teaching assistant)

Content: sampling, selection bias, conditional means, hypothesis testing, regression, DAG, model evaluation, external validity, classification, machine learning.

2022 spring, 2022 fall, 2023 spring
Statistics 1, Statistics 2
BA level, Corvinus University of Budapest (Instructor)

Content: descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, regression.

2016 spring, 2017 spring, 2017 fall, 2018 fall

Other Projects

I also work as a freelancer Data Scientist and engage in interesting projects related to data analysis. You can find some of my references listed below.

  • With our team at the logdynamic GmbH we provide Supply Chain Analytics solutions for companies.
  • Coded Thinking: Data science for decision makers.
  • Webpage creation:
    • Pilot webpage and GitHub repository for the textbook "Data Analysis - for Business, Economics and Policy." Authors: Gabor Bekes (CEU) and Gabor Kezdi† (U Michigan).
    • MicroData handbook.
  • Scientific computing survey: visualizations in Python.

I am a huge fan of GitHub and clean coding practices :) Apart from dealing with data challenges, I enjoy spending my free time outdoors hiking, cross-country skiing and doing triathlon.