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
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
Research
Portals
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
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.
-
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
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.).
-
IPython Notebooks - An interactive
alternative to LaTeX and Word. See examples how notebooks look like in
data-science-ipython-notebooks
and
the gallery.
Reviews
Useful Materials
Discussions
-
Blogs - The most popular form of self-expression among economists. The
major blog aggregators:
-
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:
-
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.
Graduate
Faculty
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
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