I thought I would share a select list of reading recommendations. My interests lie at some weird intersection of economics, politics, and sports, so perhaps such a list would be rare to come by. Like much of the rest of this site, this list also serves a dual purpose of existing for my personal reference. I didn’t want to maintain links, but Google will serve you well for finding these.
There’s no harm in leading with the most entertaining category. Silver’s book in particular might be the best introductory example I have of how to blend concepts with data to approach questions that are new to you, as well as how to communicate the results to a general audience.
| Title | Author | Type |
|---|---|---|
| The Signal and the Noise | Nate Silver | Book |
| Scorecasting | Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim | Book |
| Basketball on Paper | Dean Oliver | Book |
| Stumbling on Wins | David J. Berri and Martin B. Schmidt | Book |
| Optimal Drafting in Hockey Pools | Amy E. Summers, Tim B. Swartz, and Richard A. Lockhart | Paper |
| Estimating Player Contribution in Hockey with Regularized Logistic Regresssion | Robert B. Gramacy, Shane T. Jensen, and Matt Taddy | Paper |
This is an area that I find very motivating. These authors tackle big quesions, and they do so through careful thought and quantitative analysis. There are many other great authors and pieces on how we ended up with our world and how we could make it better, but these are some of my favourites. Reading Scott changed my way of thinking about organized government.
| Title | Author | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Seeing like a State | James C. Scott | Book |
| Poor Economics | Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo | Book |
| Empire of Cotton: A Global History | Sven Beckert | Book |
| The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Leaders | Richard McGregor | Book |
| Why Nations Fail | Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson | Book |
| A Randomized Experimental Study of Censorship in China | Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts | Paper |
| The Economic Costs of Organized Crime: Evidence from Southern Italy | Paolo Pinotti | Paper |
| Long-run Consequences of Labor Coercion: Evidence from Russian Serfdom | Johannes C. Buggle, and Steven Nafziger | Paper |
| The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials | Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, and Randi Hjalmarsson | Paper |
Sometimes we look exclusively at aggregates, to our own loss. Digging into specific situations can reveal a lot of truth. These papers are all great reads.
| Title | Author | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Buffett’s Alpha | Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller, and Lasse Heje Pedersen | Paper |
| Citigroup: A Case Study in Managerial and Regulatory Failures | Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr | Paper |
| Structural Corporate Degradation due to too-big-to-fail Finance | Mark J. Roe | Paper |
There are many other great references along these lines, but there is something in all of these that I don’t want to forget about.
| Title | Author | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Machine Learning | Thomas Mitchell | Book |
| Deep Learning with Python | François Chollet | Book |
| Deep Learning | Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville | Book |
| Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess | Matthew Lai | Paper |
| Estimation and Accuracy after Model Selection | Bradley Efron | Paper |
| Local Versus Global Models for Classification Problems: Fitting Models Where it Matters | David J. Hand and Veronica Vinciotti | Paper |
| Variable Selection in Data Mining: Building a Predictive Model for Bankruptcy | Dean P. Foster and Robert A. Stine | Paper |
| Greedy Function Approximation: A Gradient Boosting Machine | Jerome H. Friedman | Paper |
| P values: What they and what they are not | Mark J. Schervish | Paper |
| A Survey of Cross-Validation Procedures for Model Selection | Sylvan Arlot | Paper |
Last, but close to my heart, here’s where I reveal the inner econ nerd. Lucas’ paper, so influential that it is known broadly as the “Lucas critique”, was an impassioned and well thought out call to arms for the field. Similarly, but far less well known, Lehtinen and Kuorikoski’s paper struck a cord with me and tackled some questions that I thought only I was asking.
| Title | Author | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Time Series Analysis Forecasting and Controls | Box & Jenkins | Book |
| Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics Made Simple | Allen B. Downey | Book |
| The Likelihood Principle | James O. Berger, and Robert L. Wolpert | Book |
| Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique | Robert Lucas | Paper |
| Computing the Perfect Model: Why do Economists Shun Simulation? | Aki Lehtinen and Jaakko Kuorikoski | Paper |
| Why Economists Should Consider Field Experiments and 14 Tips for Pulling them Off | John A. List | Paper |
| What are we Weighting for? | Gary Solon, Steven J. Haider, and Jeffrey Wooldridge | Paper |
| Introduction to Social Network Theory | Charles Kadushin | Paper |
| Measuring the Macroeconomic Impact of Monetary Policy at the Zero Lower Bound | Jing Cynthia Wu and Fan Dora Xia | Paper |
| Bootstrap Confidence Intervals | Thomas J. DiCiccio, and Bradley Efron | Paper |
| Bootstrap Methods for Standard Errors, Confidence Intervals, and Other Measures of Statistical Accuracy | Bradley Efron and R. Tibshirani | Paper |
| Spurious Regressions in Econometrics | C.W.J. Granger and P. Newbold | Paper |
| Testing for Unit Roots and Cointegration | Bo Sjö | Paper |