Rewrite links and further reading on 102 homepage

[grayclhn]

The "further reading" is kind of a mess. So you should...

1. Clean it up and format it better (bold for headings, etc.)
2. Put it after the "past exams" section
3. Give it a short table of contents with internal links to different sections.

This is much better than overloading the course syllabus.

[grayclhn]

Dani Rodrik's blog could be a good addition: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/ So could the JEP in general, as well as specific symposia related to stuff in the class.

[grayclhn]

I'm going to purge the further reading section and dump its current contents here.

• The Little Book of Economics, 2nd edition, by Greg Ip; a general overview of macro.
• The Journal of Economic Perspectives has nontechinical articles that review different areas of economics. The articles are free too.

---

Other interesting reading

News and blogs

• The Financial Times, a daily newspaper, and its blog, FT Alphaville (which is free but requires registration).
• The Economist, a weekly news magazine, and its econ blog Free Exchange.
• Economist’s View (aggregator with some analysis)

There are a lot of good economics and finance blogs and Twitter is pretty great for those topics too.

Data science (statistics and econometrics)

Two excellent books on data visualization and statistical graphics are William Cleveland's Elements of Graphing Data and Edwart Tufte's Envisioning Information. Both authors have other books as well. Tufte also has a nice introduction to regression analysis available as an ebook on his website, http://www.edwardtufte.com.

There have also been several recent Nobel prizes awarded for macroeconometrics, financial econometrics, and empirical macro and finance.

• The 2003 Nobel Prize was given to Clive Granger and Rob Engle for cointegration (described here) and ARCH (described here). The Nobel Prize Committee has short and long summaries of this research.
• The 2011 Nobel Prize was given to Chris Sims and Thomas Sargent for macroeconometric methods. The underlying research is described by Sims, Sargent, and the Nobel Prize Committee (short version).
• The 2013 Nobel Prize was given to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller for research on asset pricing and empirical finance. Each of them has a lecture on his research (Fama, Hansen, and Shiller) and the Nobel Prize Committee has written short and long summaries.

You might also want to look at Thomas Sargent and John Stachurski's Quantitative Economics website, which focuses on computational methods for economics but not data analysis.

Macroeconomics papers

These papers elaborate on issues that we discuss in lecture.

• Landefeld, Steven J., Seskin, Eugene P., and Fraumeni, Barbara M. "Taking the pulse of the economy: Measuring GDP." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 22.2 (2008): 193-193. Available at https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.22.2.193
• Sweeney, Joan, and Richard James Sweeney. “Monetary theory and the great Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op crisis: comment.” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (1977): 86-89. (Link)
• Radford, Robert A. “The economic organisation of a POW camp.” Economica (1945): 189-201. (JSTOR)

Financial crises

• Ben Bernanke, Fed Chair until Jan 2013, gave four lectures on “The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis” that are available online. The lectures are free, but they’re also available as a book. If you’re a fast reader, the book might be cost effective.
• Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, by Keith Gessen; a series of interviews that the editor of a literary journal (n+1) did with a hedge fund manager during the recent financial crisis.
• This American Life. The giant pool of money. Radio Program, May 2008. Available online at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money

Inequality

You may be familiar with Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, which discusses long-run income and wealth inequality. We don't have time to cover these issue in class, but they are addressed by the following articles and lectures. You can also, of course, read the book itself.

• "New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century," a lecture by Thomas Piketty from June 2014. Video and transcript are online at https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capital_in_the_twenty_first_century?language=en
• A short overview in Science by Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, "Inequality in the long run." Available at http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fichiers/PikettySaez2014Science.pdf
• A longer and more technical QJE paper by Piketty and Saez, "Capital is back: wealth-income ratios in rich countries 1700-2010." Available at http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fichiers/PikettyZucman2014QJE.pdf

---