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.
- Mendeley - Bibliography
management. Support synchronization on multiple plateforms: Mac,
Windows, Ipad, Phone…
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
- Julia - An open source
scientific computing softerware.
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 - Universität Bonn,
Bonn, 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).
- econpizza -
Toolbox to solve and simulate nonlinear models with heterogeneous
agents.
- 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
License
economics.md
Github