A curated collection of links for economists. Part of the "Awesome X" series. Shortcut: https://git.io/awecon
You are welcome to edit our collection, please see https://git.io/awecon-pr or make a pull request as usual.
- MIT OCW Economics - Over 100 courses covering all major fields of econocmics. Courses include prerequisites, recommended textbooks, lecture slides, and assignments. Undergraduate and graduate programs.
- edX Economics - Introductory topics, few prerequisites.
- Khan Academy: Economics - Elementary topics.
- 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.
- Quantitative Economics - Lecture series by Thomas J. Sargent and John Stachurski using Python computational tools.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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 requires SciPy, NumPy, statsmodels, and some other libraries installed. Consider installing Anaconda, which contains much of the needed stuff.
- RStudio - A R-based environment. Many statistical R libraries are not available in other languages, so it's a pretty rich platform.
- Matlab - An industry standard for modeling and numerical optimization in economics. Free alternatives:
- Mathematica - Symbolic computations. Free alternative
- fecon235 - Computational tools for financial economics, and tutorials using Jupyter notebooks, includes data retrieval, graphics, and optimization.
- fecon236 - Computational tools for financial economics, Python code base for
fecon235.
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.
- How to efficiently manage a statistical analysis project?
- RePEc Rankings by citations
- 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.
- University rankings - May help in choosing a college.
- American Economic Association: Graduate Training in Economics - Overview of the programs, requirements, and advices to those considering a PhD program in economics.
- 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.
- 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.
- nathanlane - Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm, Sweden.
- nealbob - Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
- robertdkirkby
- trickvi - Hagstofa Íslands, Iceland.
- EconForge - Team around Pablo Winant providing packages to solve economic models.
- economics-book - Economics Textbook (Openstax).
- 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.
- Deveconodata Blogspot - Development economics datasets. Updated regularly.
- Economics Games - Free online classroom games for teaching economics.
- Top 100 Economics Blogs - Links to popular economics blogs, circa 2016.
Revision date : 2019-01-20