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Introduction to Databases and more

Personal OpenCourseWare- Khan Academy

Khan Academy

Islam in Contemporary Societies

MA in Islam in Contemporary Societies - an interesting course from Warwick

Related Podcast;
Maqsood Ahmed, the government’s senior advisor on Muslim communities, talks about being the first student on the MA course in Islam in contemporary societies.

Why World Bank's Governance Indicators suck,

According to World Bank;

This paper conceptualizes governance and provides a framework for assessing governance quality in comparative perspective based upon governance outcomes. It surveys the composite indexes on quality of governance and provides an in depth review of the widely used Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGIs). This review concludes that WGIs use state of the art aggregation techniques but fail on most fundamental considerations. They lack a conceptual framework of governance and use flawed and biased primary indicators that mostly capture Western business perspectives on governance processes using one-size-fits-all norms about such processes. They almost completely neglect citizens’ evaluations of governance outcomes reflecting any impacts on the quality of life. These primary deficiencies and changing weights, respondents and criteria lead us to conclude that the use of such indicators in cross-country and time series comparisons could not be justified. Such use is already complicating the development policy dialogue and creating much controversy and acrimony. These findings, however, should not be a cause for despair as assessing governance quality is an important task and must be undertaken with care. To this end, this paper lays out a conceptual framework which stresses that governance quality for comparative purposes is most usefully assessed by focusing on key governance outcomes capturing the impact of governments on the quality of life enjoyed by its citizens. These assessments should preferably be based on citizens’ evaluations. Such evaluations are not only feasible but also would be more credible and conducive for meaningful and productive development policy dialogues on improving governance quality.

Iqbal, Kazi and Anwar Shah. (2008). “How Do Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure Up? ”,Unpublished paper, World Bank, Washington D.C.

Related;
Inventory of Datasets/Empirical Tools on Governance

Is "good governance" an end or a means?

Thinking about governance and getting a headache

What should the World Bank know and think about governance?

A competitor for Dani Rodrik's program?

MSc in International Trade, Finance, and Development- from Barcelona

See the Director's Blog

Lecturers;
Hans-Joachim Voth / Antonio Ciccone / Alessandra Bonfiglioli / Jaume Ventura /
Fernando Broner /Kurt Schmidheiny / Ghazala Azmat / Paula Bustos /Xavier Sala-i-Martín/ Gino Gancia / Alberto Martin / Libertad González/Antoni Estevadeordal/Eduardo Levy Yeyati


Related;
Applied Econometrics for Masters Students

Free Reads

Free calculus books

Free Advice for for Budding Economists

Random Course of the Day

Central Bank Watching

Explainer of the Day

Growth Rate Question & Answer

Lecture for the Day

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Random Public Finance introductory courses

Public Sector Economics- McGill

Public Finance- UC Davis

Memo to Chris Blattman

I would appreciate very much if you could add some economics courses to 'Open Yale Courses'- Yale's answer to MIT's OpenCourseWare- when you start teaching. Currently there are no economics courses.

Making Sense out of the Dollar- Anne Krueger

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is please to host Dr. Anne Krueger of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Krueger will address the implications of a weak dollar on the US economy, as well as answer specific questions and concerns, such as:

* Does a falling dollar lead to a weakening economy?
* What repercussions will a weak dollar have on demographics, GDP, inflation, unemployment, and the future of the US economy?
* What should be done, if anything, to keep the dollar strong?

Random Course

Q: Economists love to analyze markets for goods that are illegal (e.g., drugs, prostitution, etc.). One study showed that the own-price elasticity of the demand for powder cocaine (in absolute value) is 1.2, while the comparable elasticity for marijuana is 0.6. You have probably observed that the federal and state governments punish cocaine suppliers and dealers more severely than they punish marijuana dealers. Give TWO possible (if unlikely) explanations that relate back to demand analysis for this difference in policy.

Introduction to Political Economy: Microeconomics- Charles Moul

Textbooks; Mankiw's Principles of Microeconomics and Landsburg's The Armchair Economist

Course rating: (4 out 10 stars)


*Answer to the above question here.

Random Courses on Macroeconomics

ECN 260B: International Macroeconomics - Paul R. Bergin

International Monetary Theory and Policy- Lars Svensson

International Finance and Macroeconomic Policy- Akila Weerapana

Svensson's website is the best of the three.

A good Trade Course

Taught by Ann Harrison

Related;
Fun with World Bank numbers
Stolper-Samuelson is Dead

Meet the Economist

A brilliant young scholar of extraordinary energy—he slept a mere three hours a night—he loved the humanities, especially history. But, a pragmatic son of working-class Italian immigrants, he instead chose engineering and took a job with Bell Labs, work he soon found dry and uninspiring.

Grasping for guidance, he even took an aptitude test, which produced an unequivocal—if wrong
—answer:

“Musician,” he recalled with a laugh.

Fortunately, he compromised between art and science. Now the onetime engineer and not-quite future musician is one of the world’s leading economists....

“We can take a joke because we know economics is important,” he said at one point. “There are 25,000 children who die of starvation each day and more than one billion people who live on less than one dollar a day. This is World Bank data. Certainly, a world where there is so much poverty, and children dying, is not only a world that is unethical, it also not in the long-term interest of the rich counties, because it cannot be peaceful where there is so much poverty.”

Born in a small village in Italy’s Abruzzi region east of Rome, Salvatore learned the value of hard work, education and pragmatism from his parents. His father, Nicholas, rose from modest means to become chef of a prominent hotel restaurant and learned three languages. Convinced that the United States was the “country of the future,” as he told his son, Nicholas Salvatore moved his growing family to New York City in the late 1950s.

-Honors a Matter of Course for Economics Professor and Force of Nature

Courses using Salvatore's International Economics;

Baybars Karacaovali
Lee, Hyun-Hoon

Trade Blog of the Day

Steve Suranovic's Blog
Associate Professor of Economics and the Director of the International Trade & Investment Policy Program, in the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University.

You Tube Econometrics

Mark Thoma'sIntroduction to Econometrics

If every economist was honest as Rodrik

A recent teaching evaluation of a Rodrik course;

Looking at the detailed comments, I find that most students were quite pleased with the course and the lectures. But there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction relating to a number of issues. I was generally judged to be inaccessible outside the classroom (probably fairly so). The course needs more policy applications, said some. And we need more assignments along the way to make sure we are learning the material, said many. (I am not kidding... This is a bunch of MPAID students after all.) Most significantly, it appears, many students found me somewhat intolerant of diverse views and disrespectful. We are afraid to ask "dumb" questions, wrote one person.

Panel Data Analysis

An little explainer on panel regression at Columbia Stats Blog

My reply (beyond that it's funny to see a reference to an economics paper by someone named "Dollar") is that it's a good idea to model panel data using three error terms, at the unit, time, and unit*time levels. You can (and should) also have predictors at all three levels, as appropriate. Also I'm not a fan of the overloaded term "fixed effects," but that's another story

Related;
A Primer for Panel Data Analysis

14.32 Econometrics (MIT OpenCourseWare)

Macro Aid Effectiveness Research: A Guide for the Perplexed

Through the Looking-Glass, and What OLS Found There: On Growth, Foreign Aid, and Reverse Causality