Awesome Economics

A curated collection of links for economists. Part of the “Awesome X” series.

The list is periodically updated with new links. Click “Watch” in the right top corner to follow.

Your contributions are welcomed. Add links to “Links Sent by Readers” by yourself or send new content to antontarasenko@gmail.com.

Table of Contents

• Studying
• Research
• Discussions
• Career
• Economics on GitHub
• Literature by Field
• License

Studying

Courses

• MIT OCW Economics - Over 100 courses covering all major fields of economics. Courses include prerequisites, recommended textbooks, lecture slides, and assignments. Undergraduate and graduate programs.
• edX Economics - Introductory topics, few prerequisites.
• Khan Academy: Economics - Elementary topics.

Useful Materials

• Academic Search - Search across .edu and other educational domains. These materials are more reliable than the big Internet.
• Foundational Equations of Economics - These equations show principles behind “thinking like an economist”. Graduate textbooks put these equiations in context.
• IGM Economic Experts Panel - Top economists reflect on policy-related issues. Some answers contain useful details.
• AEA Resources for Economists - A list of useful links maintained by the American Economic Association.

Research

Portals

• RePEc - Web services for economic researchers: bibliography, blog aggregator, new working papers, software.
• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Web Services - A list of helpful services.

Articles and Working Papers

• IDEAS RePEc - The largest database of economics publications (2,000,000 items). Searching through papers is easier with Google: site:ideas.repec.org <search term>. Index sources mentioned below.
• NBER - Working papers by major researchers. Many of these papers get published in peer-reviewed journal.
• SSRN Economics - Working papers, no journal publications.
• Google Scholar - Searching academic literature in general. Features author pages and citation counters. If you look for economic writings only, IDEAS would be more powerful.

Data

Datasets

• FRED2 - 380,000 (macro) time series from 80 sources. Supports plugins for importing data into Excel, Stata, R, and others. Has a mobile app.
• World Bank Data - International macro time series. Has data import plugins.
• IMF Data - The standard reference for macro data.
• Quandl - Aggregate financial and economic data from multiple sources. Some data vendors sell their data via this service. Good integration with statistical software.
• MEDevEcon - Data related to development economics.
• Monetary Economics: Data Sources - Overview of macro data sources.
• OFFSTATS - Links to official data sources by country and subject.

Search

• International Open Government Dataset Search - Over 1,000,000 government datasets. When works, this service looks like this. Otherwise, you’ll see a 403 error.
• Dataset Search Engine - Google-based search over 200 data sources, including those mentioned here. You can use Google search operators here.
• StackExchange Open Data - If you haven’t found the data you were looking for, you can ask it here.
• Reddit /r/datasets - One more place to request datasets.

Software

Writing

• LaTeX - Economists write in LaTeX because it handles mathematics and references better than Word or LibreOffice. If you write regularly, LaTeX is worth learning.
  • Beamer - A LaTeX class for presentations.
  • TikZ - An extension for drawing graphs. A how-to and a manual.
• LyX - A free and simple editor for LaTeX.
• Zotero - Bibliography management. Also install (a) Zotero browser plugin to import papers from RePEc to your library; (b) Zotero-LyX plugin to cite literature easily.
• Git - A version control system. Useful if you want to revert changes done months ago or collaborate with other authors. DropBox also has version control, but Git is more explicit. A short intro. Or use GitHub Desktop if you like it simple.

Computing

• Stata - An industry standard for statistical computations in economics. Free alternatives:
  • IPython - A Python-based environment. Econometric analysis is done with free packages: statsmodels, SciPy, NumPy, pandas.
  • RStudio - An R-based environment. R is the standard language among statisticians, so the R repositories often contain specialized libraries not available in other languages.
• Matlab - An industry standard for modeling and numerical optimization in economics. Free alternatives:
  • Octave
  • Julia - High-level dynamic programming language designed to address the needs of high-performance numerical analysis and computational science.
• Mathematica - Symbolic computations. Free alternative
  • Sage

Sharing

• GitHub - A repository for code and data. Publishing research here is not a common practice, but it’s more convenient that alternatives (university home page, DropBox, etc.).
  • GitHub Pages - Simple static websites.
  • GitHub LFS - Large file storage.
• IPython Notebooks - An interactive alternative to LaTeX and Word. See examples how notebooks look like in data-science-ipython-notebooks and the gallery.

Reviews

• Most common programs used by Economists - A community-managed list of common software.
• Software for Researchers: New Data and Applications - Covers software mentioned above and some more.

Useful Materials

• How to efficiently manage a statistical analysis project?
• RePEc Rankings by citations
  • Top Authors
  • Economic Institutions
  • Research Items
  • Software Items

Discussions

• Blogs - The most popular form of self-expression among economists. The major blog aggregators:
  • EconAcademics.org
  • Economist’s View - Mark Thoma
  • Grasping Reality - Brad DeLong
  • Marginal Revolution - Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok
  • VOX CEPR - Members of CEPR
• Economics Blog Search - A Google-based search service for aforementioned blogs.
• AEA Blog Directory - The list of major economic blogs.
• StackExchange Economics - A Q&A website where you can ask and answer questions.
• Reddit - A popular news aggregator. Has many economics-related sections, for example:
  • /r/GoodEconomics/ - Selected pieces on economic issues.
  • /r/EconPapers/ - Discussing economic papers.
• Discord - A popular chat platform
  • Academic Economics - A community with rooms to discuss economics and help members with exercises

Career

Undergraduate

• University rankings - May help in choosing a college.
  • QS World University Rankings by Subject 2016 - Economics & Econometrics
  • Academic Ranking of World Universities in Economics / Business

Graduate

• American Economic Association: Graduate Training in Economics - Overview of the programs, requirements, and advices to those considering a PhD program in economics.

Faculty

• Job Openings for Economists - The job board by the American Economic Association.
• Econ Jobs Postings - List of academic job openings.
• Economics Job Market Rumors - List of job openings for economists. Informal.

Economics on GitHub

Sorted alphabetically

Economists

• davidrpugh - Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford Martin School; Oxford Mathematical Institute, Oxford, UK.
• gboehl - Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt Germany.
• hmgaudecker - Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
• jesusfv
• jstac - Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
• mwt - Northwestern University, USA
• nathanlane - Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm, Sweden.
• nealbob - Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
• robertdkirkby
• trickvi - Hagstofa Íslands, Iceland.

Projects

• EconForge - Team around Pablo Winant providing packages to solve economic models.
• economics-book - Economics Textbook (Openstax).
• econsieve - Filter for large-scale nonlinear models.
• fecon235 - Computational tools for financial economics, Python code base and tutorials using Jupyter notebooks, includes data retrieval, graphics, and optimization.
• macro_puzzles - A list of puzzles in macroeconomics.
• pydsge - Tools to solve, filter, and estimate DSGE models with occasionally binding constraints.
• pyeconomics - Computational economics in Python.
• QuantEcon - A library for quantitative economics.
• quantecon_nyu_2016 - Topics in Computational Economics
• VFI Toolkit - Matlab toolkit for Value Function Iteration on GPU.
• zice-2014 - Course materials for Zurich Initiative for Computational Economics (ZICE) 2014.

Links Sent by Readers

• Deveconodata Blogspot - Development economics datasets. Updated regularly.
• Economics Games - Free online classroom games for teaching economics.
• Quantitative Economics - Lecture series by Thomas J. Sargent and John Stachurski using Python computational tools.
• Top 100 Economics Blogs - Links to popular economics blogs, with brief descriptions.

License