Resources
Here I group an eclectic group of resources that is relevant to conceptual issues and the practice of economics research. I include writing and computational tools that are useful for practitioners, students, and inquisitive vistors.
On Writing
- Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Linking the model to data
A guide to specifying the observation equations by Johannes Pfeifer
Some key economic data sources
- FRED: major repository of domestic and some international economic data
- Current Population Survey (CPS): primary force of labor force statistics in the United States. Administered by the Census under the supervision of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP): short panel on employment status, earnings, income, and key demographic information that includes monthly data.
- Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX): continuous flow of information on the purchasing habits of American consumers. Conists of a quarterly interview panel survey and diary.
- Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF): three-year household survey covering balance sheet, pension, income, and other demographic characteristics. Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board in cooperation with the Treasury.
- Compustat: balance sheet variables on publicly traded firms, available through Wharton Research Data Services and requires a subscription.
- American Time Use Survey: nationally representative U.S. time diary survey. Extract builder available from IPUMS.
- Utilization-adjusted total factor productivity: real-time, quarterly series on total factor productivity with utilization adjusted as in Basu, Fernald, and Kimball (2006)
- A composite help-wanted index developed by Regis Barnichon.
- Euro Area, EU, and European Statistical Data
- Business Dynamics Statistics Database: annual data series, starting in 1976. Derived from the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), covering virtually all U.S. private non-farm sector employees with robust year-over-year linking. Establishments are the primary unit of analysis and linked to parent firms. Establishment-level gross job gains and losses are aggregated to provide comprehensive measures of gross and net job creation.
- Business Formation Statistics: monthly frequency, from July 2004. Based on administrative data from Employment Identification number (EIN) and payroll tax filings. Facilitates real-time monitoring of business formation activities. Several variables available, including Business Formation within 4 Quarters (BF4Q), which quantities new employer businesses emerging from applications within four quarter of initial filing.
- Stock market, home prices, and other data from Robert Shiller's webpage
Programming/computational tools for economists
- Lectures in quantitative economics: introduction to Python and Julia applied to economics, developed by Thomas J. Sargent and John Stachurski
- Notes on quantitative macroeconomics by Gianluca Violante
- Notes and examples of Generalized Method of Moments by Richard W. Evans
- Slides and code on Bayesian estimation of DSGE models by Herbst and Schorfheide
- Computational notes on Heterogeneous-Agent Macroeconomics by Alisdair McKay
Useful Julia resources
- QuantEcon
- From zero to Julia! Really useful blog posts on Julia by Aurelio Amerio
- Official Julia tutorial on Youtube
- Official Julia documentation
- Numerical Analysis with Julia by Giray Okten
- Julia High Performance by Avik Sengupta
Articles/blogs
- San Francisco Fed economics letters
- Ben Bernanke's blog at the Brookings institute
- Paul Romer's blog