Economics Topics

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Public Goods

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/climate/epa-human-life-value.html?smid=url-share By Maxine Joselow, The New York Times, January 21, 2026
E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution By Maxine Joselow, The New York Times, January 12, 2026
The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco. By David Streitfeld, The New York Times, August 13, 2023
Putting a Dollar Value on Life? Governments Already Do By Austin Frakt, The New York Times, May 11, 2020
How Government Agencies Determine The Dollar Value Of Human Life (audio report) By Sarah Gonzalez, NPR, April 23, 2020

Globalization

Whirlpool Abandoned Its Global Ambitions. Now It’s in a World of Hurt. By John Keilman, The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2026
The hottest AI models in Silicon Valley face a powerful source of competition By Miriam Waldvogel, The Washington Post, July 15, 2026
Get Ready, America: Here Come China’s Food and Drink Chains By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Joy Dong, The New York Times, Dec. 1, 2025
China Bought $12.6 Billion in U.S. Soybeans Last Year. Now, It’s $0. By Kevin Draper, The New York Times, September 25, 2025 [Retaliatory tariffs]
A Move to the U.S. to Avoid Tariffs? There Are Trade-Offs. By Melissa Eddy, The New York Times, September 3, 2025
The Real Reason Americans Worry About Trade By Peter S. Goodman, The New York Times, August 25, 2025
Policy or Cudgel? A Trade Economist on Trump’s Hardball Tariffs. By Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times, July 11, 2025
Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car By Michael Dunne, The New York Times, July 8, 2025
Tariffs Make the World Poorer and More Perilous By Eswar Prasad, The New York Times, June 5, 2025
The Real Story of the ‘China Shock’ The jobs harm was largely local and temporary, while overall jobs and consumer welfare increased. By James J. Heckman and Hanming Fang, The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2025
How Tariffs Work By June Kim, The New York Times, February 12, 2025
Manufacturing Towns Hit by the ‘China Shock’ Bounced Back. The Workers Didn’t. By Justin Lahart, The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2025
How Trump’s Tariffs on China Changed U.S. Trade, in Charts By Inti Pacheco, The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2024
Sanctions crushed Syria’s elite. So they built a zombie economy fueled by drugs. By Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet, The Washington Post, July 25, 2024
How four U.S. presidents unleashed economic warfare across the globe By Jeff Stein and Federica Cocco, The Washington Post, July 25, 2024
Buy American? Easier Said Than Done. By Jenna Sauers, The New York Times, Jan. 9, 2024 [Review of “Making It in America,” by Rachel Slade.]
Biden’s course for U.S. on trade breaks with Clinton and Obama By David J. Lynch, The Washington Post, August 27, 2023
Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy Is No Longer True By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, June 18, 2023
Opinion What women’s underwear tells us about our trade system By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, February 9, 2023
Will remote work make it easier to ship white-collar jobs overseas? By Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post, August 26, 2022
‘What have we done?’: six years on, UK counts the cost of Brexit By Toby Helm, Robin McKie, James Tapper & Phillip Inman, The Observer, Sat 25 Jun 2022
Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction By Raghuram G. Rajan, Project Syndicate, Mar 17, 2022 [On economic sanctions]
Tweet by Douglas A. Irwin, Twitter, December 23, 2021
The Persistence of the China Shock By David Autor, Ratioforskning YouTube Channel, November 3, 2021
U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods didn’t bring companies back to the U.S., new research finds
By Jiakun Jack Zhang and Samantha A. Vortherms, The Washington Post, September 22, 2021
The British retailer Marks & Spencer blames Brexit as it closes French stores. By Eshe Nelson, The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2021 [Nice illustration of border effects.]
An anniversary for free traders The Economist, June 24, 2021
Scottish fish prices ‘collapsing’ by as much as 80% due to Brexit bureaucracy, industry warns By Ben Chapman, The Independent, January 12, 2021
U.S. trade policies have disproportionately harmed Black and Latino workers, not just the White working class Trump courted, researchers find By Tracy Jan, The Washington Post, Jan. 8, 2021
The W.T.O. Is Having a Midlife Crisis By Farah Stockman, The New York Times, December 17, 2020
The economic consequences of Sir Robert Peel: A quantitative assessment of the repeal of the Corn Laws By Douglas Irwin and Maksym Chepeliev, VoxEU, 09 December 2020
W.T.O. Says American Tariffs on China Broke Global Trade Rules By Ana Swanson, The New York Times, Sept. 15, 2020
When Globalization Really Began By Christiane Bird, The New York Times, April 14, 2020 [Review of "THE YEAR 1000: When Explorers Connected the World — and Globalization Began" By Valerie Hansen]
Data

New Measures of Prices for Global Trade Commissioner's Corner (blog), Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 15, 2018. Data: https://www.bls.gov/mxp/home.htm

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Technology and R&D

From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I. By Coralie Kraft, The New York Times Magazine, June 5, 2026
What Are A.I. Agents Actually Doing? By Cade Metz, The New York Times, June 4, 2026
There’s Something Else We Should Be Worrying About By Ezra Klein, The New York Times, May 31, 2026
Blind Waymo Users Revel in the Joy of Riding Alone By Sonia A. Rao, The New York Times, May 24, 2026
Graduates Boo Commencement Speech About A.I. By Gabriella Gershenson, The New York Times, May 14, 2026
How Do You Measure an A.I. Boom? By Kevin Roose, The New York Times, April 17, 2026
How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company By Erin Griffith, The New York Times, April 2, 2026
Economists Once Dismissed the A.I. Job Threat, but Not Anymore By Ben Casselman, The New York Times, April 3, 2026
A.I. Agents: They’re Fun. They’re Useful. But Don’t Give Them the Credit Card. By Cade Metz, The New York Times, March 19, 2026
Trapped! Inside a Self-Driving Car During an Anti-Robot Attack. By Erin Griffith, The New York Times, March 17, 2026
Where Is A.I. Taking Us? Eight Leading Thinkers Share Their Visions. The New York Times, February 2, 2026
Can A.I. Generate New Ideas? By Cade Metz, The New York Times, January 14, 2026
In China, A.I. Is Finding Deadly Tumors That Doctors Might Miss By Vivian Wang, The New York Times, January 2, 2026
A Primer on the Economics of AI from Justin Wolfers Justin Wolfers, YouTube, November 4, 2025
Thoughts by a non-economist on AI and economics By Boaz Barak, Windows on Theory (blog), November 4, 2025
A Novel Approach to Patents By Douglas Holtz-Eakin, American Action Forum, July 30, 2025
Your A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon By Steve Lohr, The New York Times, May 14, 2025
The Quest for A.I. ‘Scientific Superintelligence’ By Steve Lohr, The New York Times, March 10, 2025
Everybody Is Talking About A.I. What the Heck Is It, Anyway? By Stephen Marche, The New York Times, January 31, 2024 ["Five best books about artificial intelligence."]
The Billionaires Spending a Fortune to Lure Scientists Away From Universities By Rob Copeland, January 12, 2024
Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon By Timothy B. Lee and San Trott, Understanding A.I. (blog), July 27, 2023
Big Tech Is Bad. Big A.I. Will Be Worse. By Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, The New York Times, June 9, 2023
How Much Regulation is Too Much? MIT IDE, April 12, 2023 [New research measures how French government regulation stymies innovation among smaller firms]
What’s the Future for A.I.? By Cade Metz, The New York Times, March 31, 2023 [Where we’re heading tomorrow, next year and beyond.]
How Should I Use A.I. Chatbots Like ChatGPT? By Kevin Roose, The New York Times, March 30, 2023 [Large language models are already good at a wide variety of tasks.]
What Makes A.I. Chatbots Go Wrong? By Cade Metz, The New York Times, March 29, 2023 [The curious case of the hallucinating software.]
How Does ChatGPT Really Work? By Kevin Roose, The New York Times, March 28, 2023 [Learning how a “large language model” operates.]
How to Become an Expert on A.I. By Kevin Roose and Cade Metz, The New York Times, April 4, 2023. [Part 1 of a five-part series on A.I.]
How could AI impact developing economies? By Daniel Björkegren, March 27, 2023
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like. By David Rotman, MIT Technology Review, March 25, 2023
What Occupations Will ChatGPT Most Likely Impact? TAP, March 24, 2023
The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes By Steven Johnson, The New York Times Magazine, March 17, 2023
Fox News hosts, execs privately doubted 2020 conspiracy claims shared on air By Jeremy Barr and Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post, February 17, 2023
‘I want to destroy whatever I want’: Bing’s AI chatbot unsettles US reporter By Jonathan Yerushalmy, The Guardian, February 17, 2023
A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled By Kevin Roose, The New York Times, February 16, 2023
How Smart Are the Robots Getting? By Cade Metz, The New York Times, January 20, 2023
The Long Road to Driverless Trucks By Cade Metz, The New York Times, October 14, 2022
A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says? By Steven Johnson, The New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2022
Bill Gates: How to Develop Life-Saving Drugs Much Faster By Bill Gates, The New York Times, April 15, 2022
Save America’s Patent System By The Editorial Board, The New York Times, April 16, 2022
The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto By Kevin Roose, The New York Times, March 19, 2022
Economists Pin More Blame on Tech for Rising Inequality By Steve Lohr, The New York Times, January 12, 2022
Juul Wanted to Disrupt Big Tobacco. Instead It Created an Epidemic of Addiction. By Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New York Times, May 25, 2021. [Review of "THE DEVIL’S PLAYBOOK: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation" By Lauren Etter]
Debts, Deficits, and Patent Monopolies By Dean Baker, CEPR Blog, May 27, 2021
The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting By Kevin Roose, The New York Times, March 6, 2021
The Ingredients For Innovation Farnam Street (blog), August 2020
An exploration of ‘How Innovation Works’ By Jon Gertner, The Washington Post, June 18, 2020 [Review of “How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom” by Matt Ridley.]
The Difference Between Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents By Alexander Webb, The New York Times, April 16, 2020

Friday, March 27, 2020

Monetary Economics

Alan Greenspan Was Wrong About One Thing. It Was a Big One. By Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times, June 22, 2026
Why Countries Are Stocking Up on Gold By Eshe Nelson, The New York Times, May 1, 2026
Meet the Federal Debt, the Fed’s Actual New Boss (Sorry, Kevin Warsh) By Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times, Jan. 30, 2026
Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough review – a jaw-dropping exposé of money laundering By John Simpson, The Guardian, January 24, 2026
Fed Officials Erase Old Policy That Tolerated Higher Inflation By Matt Grossman, The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2025
China’s Central Bank Stops Buying Bonds as Deflation Fears Grip Economy By Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, January 10, 2025
The Importance of Central Bank Independence Council for Economic Advisors, The White House, May 22, 2024
China Says It Will Start Buying Apartments as Housing Slump Worsens By Alexandra Stevenson and Siyi Zhao, The New York Times, May 17, 2024. [The central bank said it would provide $41.5 billion in cheap loans to help state-owned enterprises buy housing built but not sold.]
Taylor Rule Remains Central to Interest Rate Discussions By David Plendered, Economy Matters (blog, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), August 3, 2023
What banks do with your money By Abha Bhattarai, Talia Trackim and Martin Tognola, The Washington Post, July 6, 2023
This country is ditching its currency for US Dollar. Here's why. By Uptin, YouTube, June 3, 2023
The Country Behind the $100,000,000,000,000 Bill Hits a New Stage of Dysfunction By Gabriele Steinhauser and Bernard Mpofu, The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2023
Banks Are Borrowing More From the Fed: What to Know By Jeanna Smialek and Joe Rennison, The New York Times, March 24, 2023
How the Fed Opened Pandora’s Box By Jeanna Smialek, The New York Times, February 25, 2023
AP Macro gets a makeover By Darian Woods and Adrian Ma, The Indicator from Planet Money, NPR, August 15, 2022
Inflation shows both the value and limits of monetary-policy rules The Economist, July 14, 2022
Inflation Isn’t Going to Bring Back the 1970s By Ben Bernanke, The New York Times, June 14, 2022
Wonking Out: Why Monetary Policy Has Gotten So Hard By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 10, 2022
March 2020: How the Fed Averted Economic Disaster By Nick Timiraos, The Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2022
Libor, Long the Most Important Number in Finance, Dies at 52 By Lananh Nguyen and Jeanna Smialek, The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2022
How Softies Seized the Fed By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, November 23, 2021
Teaching the New Tools of Monetary Policy Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Teaching the Linkage Between Banks and the Fed: R.I.P. Money Multiplier by Jane Ihrig, Gretchen C. Weinbach, and Scott A. Wolla, Page One Economics, September 2021
Krugman Wonks Out: What We Talk About When We Talk About Money By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, May 21, 2021
Japan’s Stock-Playing Central Bank Racks Up $56 Billion Gain By Megumi Fujikawa, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2020
For Fed’s Disaster Junkie, Pandemic Was One of 99 Bad Scenarios By Craig Torres, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 23, 2020
In unusual deal, U.S. Treasury to acquire 30 percent of trucking company in exchange for $700 million loan By Jeff Stein and Aaron Gregg, The Washington Post, July 1, 2020
Stock market recovers after Fed announces it will buy corporate bonds By Hannah Denham, The Washington Post, June 15, 2020
Bank of England to directly finance UK government’s extra spending By Chris Giles and Philip Georgiadis, Financial Times, April 9 2020
When central banks take over securities markets By Izabella Kaminska, Alphaville (blog), Financial Times, March 26 2020
How the Fed’s Magic Money Machine Will Turn $454 Billion Into $4 Trillion By Jeanna Smialek, The New York Times, March 26, 2020
Video:

How does raising interest rates control inflation? The Economist, YouTube, June 9, 2022
Monetary Policy, part 4 of 4: The Fed in Action Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, YouTube, December 2, 2021
Monetary Policy, part 3 of 4: Reservation Rate and Arbitrage Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, YouTube, December 2, 2021
Monetary Policy, part 2 of 4: Two Important Interest Rates in Monetary Policy Implementation Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, YouTube, December 2, 2021
Monetary Policy, part 1 of 4: The Fed and the Dual Mandate Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, YouTube, December 2, 2021
What are Open Market Operations? By Marginal Revolution University, YouTube, June 26, 2018
How the Federal Reserve Works: After the Great Recession By Marginal Revolution University, YouTube, April 3, 2018
How the Federal Reserve Worked: Before the Great Recession By Marginal Revolution University, YouTube, March 13, 2018
When the Fed Does Too Much Marginal Revolution University YouTube Channel, August 22, 2017
Monetary Policy: The Negative Real Shock Dilemma Marginal Revolution University YouTube Channel, August 15, 2017
Monetary Policy: The Best Case Scenario Marginal Revolution University YouTube Channel, August 8, 2017
The Fed as Lender of Last Resort By Marginal Revolution University, YouTube, August 1, 2017
The Money Multiplier Marginal Revolution University YouTube Channel, July 25, 2017
What Is Money? Marginal Revolution University YouTube Channel, July 18, 2017
Monetary Policy and the Federal Reserve Marginal Revolution University YouTube Channel, July 11, 2017

Crypto and Digital Currencies

A Crypto Coin Is Gobbling Up U.S. Treasuries By Talmon Joseph Smith, The New York Times, March 18, 2026
How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions By Aaron Krolik, The New York Times, December 7, 2025
A Nobel laureate on why stablecoins may be nothing of the sort The Economist, September 29, 2025 [Jean Tirole on stablecoins]
Why America’s new crypto regime makes other countries nervous By Kenneth Rogoff, The Washington Post, July 31, 2025
Senate Passes Cryptocurrency Bill, Handing Industry a Victory By Robert Jimison, The New York Times, June 17, 2025
Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto By Eswar Prasad, The New York Times, August 9, 2024
Cryptocurrencies II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) LastWeekTonight, YouTube, April 24, 2023
Why Stablecoins Fail: An Economist’s Post-Mortem on Terra By Russell Wong, Economic Brief, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, July 2022, No. 22-24
Crypto currencies and digital money: Taking stock By Jean-Pierre Landau, Vox EU, June 27, 2022
Fintech IMF eLibrary
Platforms, Tokens, DeFi and Smart CBDC By Jonathan Payne, Princeton Bendheim Center for Finance, YouTube, June 9, 2022
Cryptoeconomics By Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok [Textbook Chapter]
CBDCs in emerging market economies BIS Papers, April 14, 2022
Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation by Federal Reserve Board, January 20, 2022
The Future of Payments: Cryptocurrencies, Stablecoins or Central Bank Digital Currencies? By Tony Richards, Reserve Bank of Australia, November 18, 2021
Could digital currencies put banks out of business? The Economist YouTube Channel, May 8, 2021
China Creates Its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy By James T. Areddy, The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2021
Why China's New Digital Currency Raises Privacy Concerns Wall Street Journal, YouTube Channel, March 17, 2021
Why Central Banks Want To Get Into Digital Currencies CNBC YouTube Channel, March 5, 2021
The Future of Currency By Susan Athey, Stanford Graduate School of Business, YouTube, October 26, 2018
The Economics of Bitcoin & Virtual Currency By Susan Athey, Stanford Graduate School of Business, YouTube, June 18, 2015

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Coronavirus Pandemic

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives By Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times, March 16, 2025
Covid’s Deadliest Effect Took Five Years to Appear By Siddhartha Mukherjee, The New York Times, March 10, 2025
How good is the U.S. economy? It’s beating pre-pandemic predictions. By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, December 8, 2023
The Big Fail by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (blog), November 28, 2023 [Review of post mortems of US response.]
Where did the covid aid money go? The Washington Post, December 3, 2022
Millions in covid aid went to retrain veterans. Only 397 landed jobs. By Lisa Rein and Yeganeh Torbati, The Washington Post, August 25, 2022
How Australia Saved Thousands of Lives While Covid Killed a Million Americans By Damien Cave, The New York Times, May 16, 2022
How misinformation and the partisan divide drove a surge in U.S. COVID deaths PBS Newshour, YouTube, May 11, 2022
Death Toll During Pandemic Far Exceeds Totals Reported by Countries, W.H.O. Says By Benjamin Mueller and Stephanie Nolen, The New York Times, May 6, 2022
Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19, January 2020 - December 2021 World Health Organization, May 2022
New Rule: American Kleptocracy Real Time with Bill Maher, YouTube, April 29, 2022
Where $5 Trillion in Pandemic Stimulus Money Went By Alicia Parlapiano, Deborah B. Solomon, Madeleine Ngo and Stacy Cowley, The New York Times, March 11, 2022
Robust COVID Relief Achieved Historic Gains Against Poverty and Hardship, Bolstered Economy By Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, February 24, 2022
Two years into the pandemic, America has become the land of the bulging bank accounts By Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post, February 23, 2022
Most Americans have come out ahead economically in the pandemic, despite inflation By John Harwood, CNN, February 13, 2022
U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries By Benjamin Mueller and Eleanor Lutz, The New York Times, Feb. 1, 2022
Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made By Gina Kolata and Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times, Jan. 15, 2022
Wonking Out: France’s Economy Is Having a Good Pandemic by Paul Krugman, The New York Times, January 14, 2022
What we learned during the pandemic about the effectiveness of cash assistance By Kim R. Ford, The Washington Post, December 22, 2021
Remote Work Is Failing Young Employees By Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel, The New York Times, November 22, 2021
An Unsolved Mystery: Why Do More Men Die of Covid-19? By Ezekiel J. Emanuel, The New York Times, November 2, 2021
Serendipity and foresight prepared the world to fight the coronavirus By Carolyn Johnson, The Washington Post, October 1, 2021 [When the coronavirus pandemic hit last year, Barney Graham’s team at the National Institutes of Health raced to develop a vaccine.]
A scientific hunch. Then silence. Until the world needed a lifesaving vaccine. By Carolyn Johnson, The Washington Post, October 1, 2021 [On the contributions of Dr. Drew Weissman]
A one-way ticket. A cash-stuffed teddy bear. A dream decades in the making. By Carolyn Johnson, The Washington Post, October 1, 2021 [On the contributions of Dr. Katalin Kariko]
‘Uncontrolled Spread’ Review: Tested and Found Wanting By Alex Tabarrok, The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 14, 2021 [Review of ‘Uncontrolled Spread’ by Scott Gottlieb.]
Pandemic Aid Programs Spur a Record Drop in Poverty By Jason DeParle, The New York Times, July 28, 2021
Officially, the pandemic recession lasted only two months. By Ben Casselman, The New York Times, July 19, 2021
Opinion: Vermont’s and South Dakota’s covid infection rates are remarkably similar — but their outcomes are not By Ashish K. Jha, The Washinton Post, July 13, 2021
Monthly Payments to Families With Children to Begin By Jason DeParle, The New York Times, July 12, 2021
How a Hobbled Main Street Survived the Pandemic ‘Asteroid’ By Jonno Rattman, Michael Corkery, Alana Celii and Gabriel Gianordoli, The New York Times, June 1, 2021
Covid Proved the C.D.C. Is Broken. Can It Be Fixed? By Jeneen Interlandi and Brian Rea, The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2021
Welcome to the 'Take This Job and Shove It' Economy The Ezra Klein Show (podcast), The New York Tims, June 18, 2021 [Interview of Betsey Stevenson]
How the US won the economic recovery By Dylan Matthews, Vox, April 30, 2021
As Covid-19 Devastates India, Deaths Go Undercounted By Jeffrey Gettleman, Sameer Yasir, Hari Kumar and Suhasini Raj. Photographs by Atul Loke. The New York Times, April 24, 2021
World Happiness Report is out, with a surprising picture of global resilience By Ryan Bacic, The Washington Post, March 23, 2021

World Happiness Report 2021 Citation: Helliwell, John F., Richard Layard, Jeffrey Sachs, and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, eds. 2021. World Happiness Report 2021. New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Covid? What Covid? Taiwan Thrives as a Bubble of Normality. By Amy Qin and Amy Chang Chien, The New York Times, March 13, 2021
To Juice the Economy, Biden Bets on the Poor By Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, March 6, 2021
How Economist Emily Oster Ended Up at the Center of the Fight Over Schools Reopening By Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone, March 4, 2021
Mexico is vaccinating its poorest citizens first — against the advice of health experts By Kevin Sieff and Paulina Villegas, The Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2021
Who Spent Their Last Stimulus Checks? By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman and Michael Stepner, The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2021
The Biden stimulus is admirably ambitious. But it brings some big risks, too. By Lawrence H. Summers, The Washington Post, February 4, 2021
Power, Patriotism and 1.4 Billion People: How China Beat the Virus and Roared Back By Steven Lee Myers, Keith Bradsher, Sui-Lee Wee and Chris Buckley, The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2021
Good Vaccine News By David Leonhardt, The New York Times, February 1, 2021
India: has the Covid pandemic started to burn itself out? By Amy Kazmin, The Financial Times, January 30, 2021
From Michael Lewis, a ‘Superhero Story’ About the Pandemic By Alexandra Alter, The New York Times, Jan. 28, 2021
Shutdowns by Democratic governors did not cause the pandemic jobs crisis By Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2021
One Year, 400,000 Coronavirus Deaths: How the U.S. Guaranteed Its Own Failure By Sarah Mervosh, Mike Baker, Patricia Mazzei and Mark Walker, The New York Times, Jan. 17, 2021
How Singapore Has Kept the Coronavirus Off Campus By Sui-Lee Wee, The New York Times, Jan. 9, 2021
Trump’s Focus as the Pandemic Raged: What Would It Mean for Him? By Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere and Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2020
Covid-19 Was Consuming India, Until Nearly Everyone Started Wearing Masks By Eric Bellman, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 30, 2020
Stimulus Money Should Have Gone to the Jobless, Economists Say By Nelson D. Schwartz and Gillian Friedman, The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2020
Employment recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic By Elizabeth Weber Handwerker, Peter B. Meyer, Joseph Piacentini, Michael Schultz, and Leo Sveikauskas, Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 2020, https://doi.org/10.21916/mlr.2020.27.
The U.S. was supposed to be equipped to handle a pandemic. So what went wrong? By The Editorial Board, The Washington Post, December 26, 2020
The CDC’s failed race against covid-19: A threat underestimated and a test overcomplicated By David Willman, The Washington Post, Dec. 26, 2020
The Ghost of Sabotage Future By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, December 21, 2020
Congress Passes Huge Coronavirus Relief Bill By Emily Cochrane, The New York Times, Dec. 21, 2020
Time for a Second Round of PPP By Michael Faulkender and Stephen Miran, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 17, 2020

The Job-Preservation Effects of Paycheck Protection Program Loans By Michael Faulkender, Robert Jackman, and Stephen I. Miran, Office of Economic Policy, Working Paper 2020-01, December 2020

Getting Everyone Vaccinated, With ‘Nudges’ and Charity Auctions By Richard H. Thaler, The New York Times, December 9, 2020
The Pandemic Is Showing Us How Capitalism Is Amazing, and Inadequate By Neil Irwin, The New York Times, November 14, 2020.
With Covid-19 Under Control, China’s Economy Surges Ahead By Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, Oct. 19, 2020
The Tenants Who Evicted Their Landlord by Matthew Desmond, The New York Times Magazine, October 14, 2020
The Other Way Covid Will Kill: Hunger By Peter S. Goodman, Abdi Latif Dahir and Karan Deep Singh, The New York Times, Sept. 11, 2020
How Hunger Persists in a Rich Country Like America By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 2, 2020
First Famines of Coronavirus Era Are at World’s Doorstep, U.N. Warns By Rick Gladstone, The New York Times, Sept. 5, 2020
The Senate Is on Vacation While Americans Starve By Janet Yellen and Jared Bernstein, The New York Times, Aug. 24, 2020
$300 Unemployment Benefit: Who Will Get It and When? By Patricia Cohen and Tiffany Hsu, The New York Times, Aug. 23, 2020
In China, Where the Pandemic Began, Life Is Starting to Look … Normal By Javier C. Hernández, The New York Times, Published Aug. 23, 2020
Virus Alters Where People Open Their Wallets, Hinting at a Halting Recovery By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Ella Koeze and Sapna Maheshwari, The New York Times, Aug. 19, 2020
Manhattan Vacancy Rate Climbs, and Rents Drop 10% By Matthew Haag, The New York Times, Aug. 18, 2020
A global debt crisis is looming – how can we prevent it? By Joseph Stiglitz and Hamid Rashid, The Guardian, August 3, 2020
Amid a Deadly Virus and Crippled Economy, One Form of Aid Has Proved Reliable: Food Stamps By Jason DeParle, The New York Times, July 19, 2020
Covid 19, globotics, and development By Richard Baldwin and Rikard Forslid, VoxEU, 16 July 2020
As the Trump disaster gets worse, a new political theory helps explain it by Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, July 15, 2020
Macroeconomic Implications of COVID-19: Can Negative Supply Shocks Cause Demand Shortages? By Veronica Guerrieri, Guido Lorenzoni, Ludwig Straub, Iván Werning, NBER Working Paper No. 26918, April 2020

Veronica Guerrieri on COVID-19: Can Supply Shocks Cause Demand Shortages? Princeton Economics (YouTube channel), June 19, 2020
Viral recessions: Lack of demand during the coronavirus crisis By Veronica Guerrieri, Guido Lorenzoni, Ludwig Straub, Iván Werning, voxeu.org, 06 May 2020

How Did COVID-19 and Stabilization Policies Affect Spending and Employment? A New Real-Time Economic Tracker Based on Private Sector Data By Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Michael Stepner, The Opportunity Insights Team (Working Paper), May 2020

Raj Chetty on the economic impacts of COVID-19: Real-time evidence from private sector data Princeton Economics (YouTube channel), June 17, 2020
A new paper finds stimulus checks, small business aid, and “reopening” can’t rescue the economy By Dylan Matthews, vox.com, Jun 17, 2020
The Rich Cut Their Spending. That Has Hurt All the Workers Who Count on It. By Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano, The New York Times, June 17, 2020

What a successful economic recovery plan must look like By Jason Furman, Timothy Geithner, Glenn Hubbard and Melissa S. Kearney, The Washington Post, June 16, 2020
After the Pandemic, a Global Hunger Crisis By Arif Husain, The New York Times, June 12, 2020
New Rules of Retirement By Washington Post Staff, The Washington Post, May 15, 2020
What happens if you get coronavirus at work? Experts say it might be hard to prove. By Lateshia Beachum, The Washington Post, May 29, 2020
On the Economics of Not Dying By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, May 28, 2020
Coronavirus: Spain set for basic income to ease crisis pain BBC, May 18, 2020
America risks doing too little, not too much, to save the economy By Emily Stewart, vox.com, May 15, 2020
Sweden Stayed Open. A Deadly Month Shows the Risks. By Lauren Leatherby and Allison McCann, The New York Times, May 15, 2020
I Live in Sweden. I’m Not Panicking. By Maud Cordenius, The New York Times, May 15, 2020
Reopening the Economy Would Add 233,000 Deaths by July but Save Millions of Jobs By Andrew Soergel, U.S. News & World Report, May 1, 2020
Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It? By The New York Times Magazine, April 10, 2020
‘Instead of Coronavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us.’ A Global Food Crisis Looms. By Abdi Latif Dahir, The New York Times, April 23, 2020
A Tale of Two Possible Recoveries by N. Gregory Mankiw, The New York Times, April 16, 2020
It’s the End of the World Economy as We Know It By Neil Irwin, The New York Times, April 16, 2020
A Gloomy Prediction on How Much Poverty Could Rise By Jason DeParle, The New York Times, April 16, 2020
Straggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, April 17, 2020
11 concrete steps the government can take to avert economic disaster By Matthew Yglesias, vox.com, April 13, 2020
Donald Trump is wrong, the economic hit of the coronavirus will last for years By Barry Eichengreen, The Guardian (via Project Syndicate), April 13, 2020
Fauci confirms New York Times report Trump rebuffed social distancing advice By Martin Pengelli, The Guardian, April 12, 2020
Inequality doesn't just make pandemics worse – it could cause them By Laura Spinney, The Guardian, April 12, 2020
He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus By Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes, The New York Times, April 11, 2020
Everything Is Awful. So Why Is the Stock Market Booming? By Neil Irwin, The New York Times, April 10, 2020
Robots Welcome to Take Over, as Pandemic Accelerates Automation By Michael Corkery and David Gelles, The New York Times, April 10, 2020
Predictions for the Coronavirus Stock Market By Robert J. Shiller, The New York Times, April 2, 2020
Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract by The Editorial Board, The Financial Times, April 3, 2020
PANDUMBIC (Official Trailer) The Daily Show, March 10, 2020
Saluting the Heroes of the Coronavirus Pandumbic The Daily Show, April 3, 2020
Why Is Price-Gouging Bad? by Paul Krugman, April 2020
The dark side of ventilators: Those hooked up for long periods face difficult recoveries By Carolyn Y. Johnson and Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post, April 3, 2020
Testing Is Our Way Out By Paul Romer and Rajiv Shah, The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2020
Jobs Aren’t Being Destroyed This Fast Elsewhere. Why Is That? By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The New York Times, March 30, 2020
How You Can Protect Your Community, Not Just Your Own Health By Oeindrila Dube and Katherine Baicker, The New York Times, March 26, 2020
The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed. By Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, The New York Times, March 29, 2020
Testing Blunders Cost Vital Month in U.S. VIrus Fight By Michael D. Shear, Abby Goodnough, Sheila Kaplan, Sheri Fink, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland, The New York Times, March 29, 2020
Price Gouging Complaints Surge Amid Coronavirus Pandemic By Michael Levenson, The New York Times, March 27, 2020
Key Economic Facts About COVID-19 by Michael Greenstone (editor), Becker Friedman Institute, March 27, 2020
COVID-19 Policy Tracker MultiState
Simulating Covid-19: Part 1 by Paul Romer, March 23, 2020 [Also: Part 2 and Part 3]
Coronavirus Info-Database LessWrong
HELP! (HEaLth and Pandemics) Econ Working Group
The U.S. Is About to Vastly Increase Its Debt. That’s a Good Thing. By Neil Irwin, The New York Times, March 27, 2020
The Coronavirus Economy: When Washington Takes Over Business By Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, David Gelles, Peter Eavis and David Yaffe-Bellany, The New York Times, March 26, 2020
After the Lockdown, Fear and Chaos in India By Pragya Tiwari, The New York Times, March 25, 2020
On Coronavirus, We’re #1 by Paul Krugman, The New York Times. March 27, 2020
Can We Put a Price Tag on a Life? The Shutdown Forces a New Look By Eduardo Porter and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, March 24, 2020
The Coronavirus Curve Numberphile YouTube Channel, March 25, 2020
Who Should Be Saved First? Experts Offer Ethical Guidance By Austin Frakt, The New York Times, March 24, 2020
Should older Americans die to save the economy? Ethicists call it a false choice. By Sarah Pulliam Bailey, The Washington Post, March 24, 2020
What the Government Needs to Do Next By James K. Galbraith, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Mar 23, 2020
A Proposal for Social Insurance During the Pandemic By N. Gregory Mankiw, Greg Mankiw's Blog, March 23, 2020
The U.S. Shut Down Its Economy. Here’s What Needs to Happen in Order to Restart. By Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, March 22, 2020
The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say By Donald G. McNeil Jr., The New York Times, March 23, 2020
We All Need Small Businesses. Don’t Let Them Die. By Sendhil Mullainathan, The New York Times, March 19, 2020
Just Use ‘the Computer’ to Give People More Money By Stephanie Kelton, The New York Times, March 21, 2020
Special Report: How Korea trounced U.S. in race to test people for coronavirus by Chad Terhune, Dan Levine, Hyunjoo Jin, Jane Lanhee Lee, Reuters, March 18, 2020
We know enough now to act decisively against Covid-19. Social distancing is a good place to start By Marc Lipsitch, STAT, March 18, 2020
The economic rationale for strong action now against Covid-19 By Mireille Jacobson and Tom Chang, STAT, March 18, 2020
A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data By John P.A. Ioannidis, STAT, March 17, 2020
Plans for economic mitigation from the coronavirus by Tyler Cowen, downloaded on March 18, 2020
Keeping Business Alive: The Government Will Pay by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, March 16, 2020
Filling the Holes in Family and Business Budgets: Unemployment Benefits and Work Sharing in the Time of Pandemics by Arindrajit Dube, econfip (blog), March 2020
Filling the Holes in Family and Business Budgets: Unemployment Benefits and Work Sharing in the Time of Pandemics by Arindrajit Dube, March 17, 2020
The U.S. economy is in a tailspin—policymakers must do everything they can to protect workers and their families by Claudia Sahm, Equitable Growth (blog), March 13, 2020
How to Help American Businesses Endure and Jobs Survive By Steven Hamilton and Stan Veuger, March 17, 2020 [Also available here.]
How to Treat the Financial Symptoms of Covid-19 By John H. Cochrane, The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2020
Thoughts on the Pandemic by N. Gregory Mankiw, Greg Mankiw's Blog, March 13, 2020
Possible Fiscal Policies for Rare, Unanticipated, and Severe Viral Outbreaks by Bill Dupor, Economic Synopses, March 17, 2020
Throwing a COVID-19 LIQUIDITY LIFE-LINE by Markus Brunnermeier, Jean-Pierre Landau, Marco Pagano and Ricardo Reis, 17 March 2020
Macroeconomic Policy In The Time Of COVID-19 by Donald Marron, taxvox, March 17, 2020

Saturday, March 7, 2020

Business Cycles

This Doommaxxing Has Got to Stop By Robert J. Shiller, The New York Times, June 22, 2026
Wall Street’s Recession Warning Is Flashing. Some Wonder if It’s Wrong. By Joe Rennison, The New York Times, July 12, 2023
How Well Do Economists Forecast Recessions? By Zidong An, João Tovar Jalles, andPrakash Loungani, IMF Working Papers, March 5, 2018
Minding the Output Gap: What Is Potential GDP and Why Does It Matter? By Scott Wolla, Page One Economics, May 2021
The Recession Isn’t Over Till They Say It’s Over. (But Who Are They?) By Neil Irwin, The New York Times, June 14, 2021
Why the Coronavirus Could Threaten the U.S. Economy Even More Than China’s By Austan Goolsbee, The New York Times, March 6, 2020

If people stop traveling and going to the dentist, the gym or even March Madness basketball games, the impact could be enormous.

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Data Analysis

Resources By Claes Backman
Benjamin Golub on Modern AI for Economics Research: An Overview of Tools Markus' Academy, December 18, 2025
VoxDev as an educational resource By Oliver Hanney, VoxDev blog, December 18, 2023
Purely Evidence-Based Policy Doesn’t Exist By Lars Peter Hansen, Chicago Booth Review, February 11, 2019
Awesome Causal Inference By Matteo Courthoud, Github
DiD Resources By Jonathan Roth
CRAN Task View: Empirical Finance By Dirk Eddelbuettel, R-project.org
CRAN Task View: Econometrics By Achim Zeileis, Grant McDermott, Kevin Tappe, R-project.org
CRAN Task View: Optimization and Mathematical Programming By Florian Schwendinger and Hans W. Borchers, R-project.org
Tidysynth R package vignette for synthetic control method of data analysis

Code

An Introduction to AI and Economics By Bryce Quillin, BBVA OpenMind, December 1, 2021
Coding for Economists by Arthur Turrell, 2021
Chartbook #45: Of Scarface & the Nobel - The Double Life of Mariel By Adam Tooze, Chartbook (Substack blog), October 12, 2021
A Nobel Prize for the Credibility Revolution by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (blog), October 11, 2021
David Card on the return to schooling By Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution (blog), October 11, 2021
Nobel economics prize winners showed economists how to turn the real world into their laboratory By Jamie Locke-Jones, University of St Andrews, 12 October 2021
gEcon : Calibration of RBC or DSGE model with IRFs in R by K & L Fintech Modeling (blog), August 3, 2021
DiD Reading Group By Taylor Wright (blog)
Economist Becomes Pandemic Sensation by Helping Stressed Parents By Esme E. Duprez, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 8, 2020
An Introduction to Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) By Franz X. Mohr, r-econometrics, August 13, 2020
What Coronavirus Researchers Can Learn From Economists By Anupam B. Jena and Christopher M. Worsham, The New York Times, June 30, 2020
Purely Evidence-Based Policy Doesn’t Exist By Lars Peter Hansen, Chicago Booth Review, February 11, 2019
Books

Statistical Tools for Causal Inference By Sylvain Chabé-Ferret
A Primer in Econometric Theory By John Stachurski
Python for Data Science By Arthur Turrell
Coding for Economists By Arthur Turrell
Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign By Graeme Blair, Alexander Coppock, and Macartan Humphreys
Big Book of R: Ch. 14 Economics By Oscar Baruffa
Using R, Python and Julia for Introductory Econometrics By Florian Heiss and Daniel Brunner
Introduction to Econometrics with R by Christoph Hanck, Martin Arnold, Alexander Gerber, and Martin Schmelzer

R companion to the textbook Introduction to Econometrics by Stock and Watson (2015)

Principles of Econometrics with R by Constantin Colonescu
Tidy Finance with R By Christoph Scheuch, Stefan Voigt, Patrick Weiss
Reproducible Finance By Jonathan Regenstein
Causal Inference: What If by Miguel Hernan and Jamie Robins
Econometrics By Bruce E. Hansen, February 18, 2021
Data Analysis for Business, Economics, and Policy Website for textbook
Practical Data Analysis for Political Scientists by Brenton Kenkel

Data Sources

Guide to Indian Data Maintained by Taha Ibrahim Siddiqui
Small-Area Global Elections (SAGE) Dataset by Noah Dasanaike
Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets

The datasets include: Weighted Classification Conversion Tables (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6AADMR) and Bilateral Trade Data Aggregated by Year (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5NGVOB).
Bustos, S., Jackson, E., Torun, D. et al. Tackling Discrepancies in Trade Data: The Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06488-2