Managing Your Career as an Economist after Tenure

Managing Your Career as an Economist after Tenure

—Robert E. Hall,

Robert and Carole McNeil Professor of Economics and Senior Fellow,

Hoover Institution, Stanford Universit

Economic games

Games for learning economics

http://www.economicgames.org

Mostlyharmlesseconometrics

http://www.mostlyharmlesseconometrics.com

Governance, Growth, and Development Decision-making

By

Douglass North
Daron Acemoglu
Francis Fukuyama
Dani Rodrik

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTPUBLICSECTORANDGOVERNANCE/Resources/governanceandgrowth.pdf

http://www.nash-equilibrium.com

Dedicated to the advancement of economics, pricing, and strategy.

http://www.nash-equilibrium.com/

Athey: Advice for Applying to Grad School in Economics

http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~athey/gradadv.html

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."