G.A. Akerlof: Writing the "The Market for 'Lemons'": A Personal and Interpretive Essay

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/articles/akerlof/index.html

C. Blattman: How to get a PhD *and* save the world

http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-to-get-phd-and-save-world.html

'Tis the season for graduate school applications and associated angst. Several aspiring political scientists and economists have asked me for my thoughts and advice, and I've generally started by pointing them to Greg Mankiw's excellent Advice for Aspiring Economists and Advice for Grad Students.

Mankiw's advice does not quite cater, however, to those of us that are young, idealistic, and want to pursue PhD research that makes life better for those less fortunate. For those so inclined, I offer the following addenda.

WRI-Plants at the Pump: Biofuels, Climate Change, and Sustainability

http://pdf.wri.org/plants_at_the_pump.pdf

H-W. Sinn: Food or Fuel?

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sinn17/English

The Economist: The End of Cheap Food

Rising food prices are a threat to many; they also present the world with an enormous opportunity

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10252015

Rising incomes in Asia and ethanol subsidies in America have put an end to a long era of falling food prices

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10250420

Resources for Economists

http://www.aeaweb.org/RFE

S. Johnson-Food and Biofuels: The Price of Success

"In a column in the December 2007 edition of Finance & Development magazine, IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson looks at how the adoption of biofuels is driving up world food prices. He suggests that rich countries could help limit the rise, which is hurting the poor in low-income countries the most, by removing ethanol subsidies and cutting high tariffs."

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2007/RES123A.htm

Sherwin Rosen

http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/srosen.html

"SHERWIN ROSEN WAS ONE of the great applied microeconomic theorists of recent decades. His life was devoted to understanding how diverse people, products, and technologies could be brought together and allocated appropriately. As an example of the kind of analyses that Rosen pioneered, consider the many varieties of automobiles that are produced. Some are higher quality than others, some are small, some are large, some fast, some slow, some are beautiful, and others are comfortable. People have different preferences with respect to these attributes. A larger person might prefer a larger car. A daredevil might like a faster one. How does the right car get to the right person? The obvious answer is that the market ensures that cars are available and consumers, through free choice, purchase the car they want. But at what price? How are the prices of the various attributes set so as to equate supply with demand, not just for some homogeneous commodity like wheat but also for some complex good like an automobile?"

The Economic Naturalist by R. H. Frank

http://www.robert-h-frank.com/book.html

http://www.robert-h-frank.com/ENIntroduction.pdf

[from the Introduction]

In short, the human brain’s specialty seems to be absorbing
information in narrative form. My economic naturalist writing
assignment plays directly to this strength. It calls for the title of
each student’s paper to be a question. For three reasons, I have
found it useful to insist that students pose the most interesting
questions they can. First, to come up with an interesting question,
they must usually consider numerous preliminary questions, and
this itself is a useful exercise. Second, students who come up with
interesting questions have more fun with the assignment and
devote more energy to it. And third, the student who poses an
interesting question is more likely to tell others about it. If you
can’t actually take an idea outside the classroom and use it, you
don’t really get it. But once you use it on your own, it is yours
forever.

Econtalk.org

http://www.econtalk.org

Economics podcasts for daily life. Hosted by Russ Roberts.

Globalisation Institute

http://www.globalisation.eu

"The Globalisation Institute is a Brussels-headquartered think tank that promotes ideas to help Europe thrive in the global economy"

Tim Harford-Blog

The Undercover Economist

http://timharford.com

Biofuels : Is the cure worse than the disease ?

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/46/39348696.pdf

The 20th meeting of the Round Table on Sustainable Development on 11-12 September 2007 considered the sustainable potential of biofuels and government policies to support them. Ministers from OECD member and non members countries, senior representatives of international organisations, academia, civil society, and senior private sector executives discussed the technical potential of biofuels production and national and international policies to promote their development.

Biofuels could boost global warming

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/21090701.asp

PJ Crutzen et al, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 2007, 7, 11191

"Growing and burning many biofuels may actually raise rather than lower greenhouse gas emissions, a new study led by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has shown. The findings come in the wake of a recent OECD report, which warned nations not to rush headlong into growing energy crops because they cause food shortages and damage biodiversity...

But other experts are critical of Crutzen's approach. Simon Donner, a nitrogen researcher based at Princeton University, US, says the method is elegant but there is little evidence to show the N2O yield from fertilized plants is really as high as 3-5 per cent. Crutzen's basic assumption, that pre-industrial N2O emissions are the same as natural N2O emissions, is 'probably wrong', says Donner."

Mancur Olson

http://www.iris.umd.edu/StaticReader.aspx/About_IRIS/History/Mancur_Olson.htm


“Rather than being a luxury that only rich countries can afford, individual rights are essential to obtaining the bounteous harvests that property-intensive and contract-intensive production can yield.” Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

http://www.jir.com/links.html

Carbon Monitoring For Action

http://carma.org/

"CARMA reveals the carbon emissions of more than 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies in every country on Earth."

Inside the Economist's Mind

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=9781405157155

Interviews:
1. An Interview with Wassily Leontief (Interviewed by Duncan K. Foley).
2. An Interview with David Cass (Interviewed jointly by Stephen E. Spear and Randall Wright).
3. An Interview with Robert E. Lucas, Jr. (Interviewed by Bennett T. McCallum).
4. An Interview with János Kornai (Interviewed by Olivier Blanchard).
5. An Interview with Franco Modigliani (Interviewed by William A. Barnett and Robert Solow).
6. An Interview with Milton Friedman (Interviewed by John B. Taylor).
7. An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson (Interviewed by William A. Barnett).
8. An Interview with Paul A. Volcker (Interviewed by Perry Mehrling).
9. An Interview with Martin Feldstein (Interviewed by James M. Poterba).
10. An Interview with Christopher A. Sims (Interviewed by Lars Peter Hansen).
11. An Interview with Robert J. Shiller (Interviewed by John Y. Campbell).
12. An Interview with Stanley Fischer (Interviewed by Olivier Blanchard).
13. An Interview with Jacques Drèze (Interviewed by Pierre Dehez and Omar Licandro).
14. An Interview with Thomas J. Sargent (Interviewed by George W. Evans and Seppo Honkapohja).
15. An Interview with Robert Auman (Interviewed by Sergiu Hart).
16. Conversations with James Tobin and Robert Shiller on the "Yale Tradition" in Macroeconomics (Conducted by David Colander).

The Becker-Posner Blog

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

A.J. Oswald: An Examination of the Reliability of Prestigious Journals

http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/files/Prestigeous_Scholarly_Journals.pdf

"Scientific-funding bodies are increasingly under pressure to use journal rankings to measure research quality. Hiring and promotion committees routinely hear an equivalent argument: ‘this is important work because it is to be published in prestigious journal X’. But how persuasive is such an argument? This paper examines data on citations to articles published 25 years ago. It finds that it is better to write the best article published in an issue of a medium quality journal such as the OBES than all four of the worst four articles published in an issue of an elite journal like the AER. Decision-makers need to understand this."

Global Warming Map Animation

NASA has produced an animated map that illustrates changes in global temperatures between meteorological years 1891 and 2006. This animated map is an .mp4 file that can be viewed using a QuickTime player. Each frame in the animation represents a one year increment of the ten year mean temperature anomaly. This animation begins with a historic ten year (1891-1900) mean meteorological year temperature anomaly map and ends with a recent (1997-2006) ten year mean meteorological year temperature anomaly map. The animation clearly illustrates a global warming trend over the time interval.

http://geology.com/news/images/a10_1891_1997_6fps_800kbps_sor3.mov

Colleges and Universities that Offer Free Courses Online

"A handful of world-class universities and colleges have decided to offer free courses, assignments, and lectures via the World Wide Web, using a variety of means that include streaming video, podcasts, and downloadable lecture notes. "

http://education-portal.com/articles/Colleges_and_Universities_that_Offer_Free_Courses_Online.html

Norman Borlaug

http://www.normanborlaug.org/

"For over a half century, the scientific and humanitarian achievements of Dr. Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize winner, Congressional Gold Medal Winner, and recipient of over 50 honorary Doctorate Degrees) has kept starvation at bay for millions of people in third world countries. Dr. Borlaug, "Father of the Green Revolution" continues his battle against starvation in Africa."

G. Hardin Society:

http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/index.html

"The Garrett Hardin Society is dedicated to the preservation of the writings and ideas of Garrett James Hardin. A common thread throughout his work is an interest in bioethics. Trained as an ecologist and microbiologist and a Professor of Human Ecology at the University of California for more than thirty years, he is best known for his 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons. "

P. L. Bernstein: Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story Of Risk

http://www.businessweek.com/1996/43/b349881.htm

"Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it. This is a lively, panoramic book that includes tales of everyone from Omar Khayyam to Florence Nightingale to Daniel Ellsberg. Khayyam, the poet, was also a mathematician. Nightingale, the nurse, once offered to fund a chair in applied statistics at Oxford University. And Ellsberg, the Defense Dept. analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, specialized in the behavioral psychology of risk-taking."

---

CHAPTER 4

http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/chap4.htm

Punctuation Made Simple

http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~olson/pms/intro.html

D. Acemoglu: Introduction to Modern Economic Growth

http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/books

United Nations Millenium Development Goals Indicators

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mdg/default.aspx

MIT: OpenCourseWare

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

Writing Academic Papers

http://www.rddirect.org.uk/documents/writingpapers.html#_Toc49051702

Online Economics Textbooks

http://www.oswego.edu/~economic/newbooks.htm

Open Directory Project: Economics

http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Economics//

S. Martin: Economics Quotes

http://www.mgmt.purdue.edu/faculty/smartin/equotes/equote.htm

Einstein, Albert
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Solow, Robert M.
But part of the job of economics is weeding out errors. That is much harder than making them, but also more fun.

Bresnahan, Timothy F.
Economists ought to know about the economy.

Caves, Richard
Constrained-maximization problems are mother's milk to the well-trained economist.

Davis, Richard M.
It is commonplace that economists spend a discouraging proportion of their working time in controversy over definition.

Keynes, John Maynard
Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results.

R. Felder: Learning Styles

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Learning_Styles.html

"Students preferentially take in and process information in different ways: by seeing and hearing, reflecting and acting, reasoning logically and intuitively, analyzing and visualizing, steadily and in fits and starts. Teaching methods also vary. Some instructors lecture, others demonstrate or lead students to self-discovery; some focus on principles and others on applications; some emphasize memory and others understanding...This site contains resources for a model of learning styles generally referred to as the Felder-Silverman model. The model was originally formulated by Dr. Felder in collaboration with Dr. Linda K. Silverman, an educational psychologist, for use by college instructors and students in engineering and the sciences, although it has subsequently been applied in a broad range of disciplines. "

The Apple-Cinnamon Cheerios War

J. Hausman's objection to T. Bresnahan:
http://www.stanford.edu/~tbres/research/reply%20to%20bresnahan.pdf

T. Bresnahan's response to J. Hausman
http://www.stanford.edu/~tbres/research/hausman%20recomment.pdf

D. McCloskey: Economical Writing

http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Article_86.pdf

D. Rodrik's Weblog: Unconventional thoughts on economic development and globalization

http://rodrik.typepad.com/

G. Mankiw's Blog: Random Observations for Students of Economics

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/

S.A. Socolofsky: How to write a research journal article in engineering and science

http://www.ifh.uni-karlsruhe.de/lehre/dokkurs/gutes-schreiben/paper_how-to.pdf

PBS TV Series "Free to Choose" by Milton Friedman

http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/

Traffic Rankings for Major Business and Economics Websites

http://www.gongol.com/lists/bizeconsites/

Jokes about economists and economics

http://netec.wustl.edu/JokEc.html

JokEc is a collection of professional humor for the benefit of economists as well as non-economists.

Nobel Laureates in Economics

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/

PBS: The Proof

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/

For over 350 years, some of the greatest minds of science struggled to prove what was known as Fermat's Last Theorem -- the idea that a certain simple equation had no solutions. Now hear from the man who spent seven years of his life cracking the problem, read the intriguing story of an 18th century woman mathematician who hid her identity in order to work on Fermat's Last Theorem, and demonstrate that a related equation, the Pythagorean Theorem, is true.

PBS: Trillion Dollar Bet

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stockmarket/formula.html

MERTON MILLER: When I saw the formula I knew enough about it to know that this is the answer. This solved the ancient problem of risk and return in the stock market. It was recognized by the profession for what it was as a real tour de force.

H. Varian: How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/how.pdf

J. Shewchuk: Giving an Academic Talk

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/speaking.html

D. J. Pannell: Prose, psychopaths and persistence

Prose, psychopaths and persistence: Personal perspectives on publishing

http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/dpannell/prose.htm

K. Choi: How To Publish in Top Journals

http://www.roie.org/how.htm

G. Mankiw: My Rules of Thumb

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mankiw/papers/My_Rules_of_Thumb.pdf

Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr

www.astro.washington.edu/astro480/To_CCD/WilliamStrunk.pdf