Courses & Tutorials
Awesome Economics – Massive Collection of Resources
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
- Academic Search – Search across
.eduand 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.
- 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:
- Matlab – An industry standard for modeling and numerical optimization in economics. Free alternatives:
- 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.).
- 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
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.
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.
