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Economics

A Bit About Economics Research

Welcome Bennies and Johnnies! Throughout these pages you will find all you need to know about conducting research in the field of Economics. So, whether you are majoring or minoring in Economics or taking an Economics course, be sure to explore these pages for research tips and tricks. Including:

REMEMBER: reach out to Business Librarian, Kelly, if you get stuck! You can always schedule a Research Appointment in The Hive.

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Book Recommendations for ECON Students

Abundance

Abundance

 In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre­serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.

Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

In Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, Ibarra offers advice to: Redefine your job in order to make more-strategic contributions; diversify your network so that you connect to, and learn from, a wider range of stakeholders; and become more playful with your self-concept, allowing your familiar (and possibly outdated) leadership style to evolve. Ibarra turns the usual leadership advice-to generate insight about yourself through reflection and analysis of your strengths and weaknesses-on its head by arguing that you must first act and experiment your way into trying new things. 

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple’s ascent and who tried to forge a different path.

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life

In The Armchair Economist, Steven E. Landsburg shows how economic thinking illuminates the entire range of human behavior. But instead of focusing on the workings of financial markets, international trade, and other topics distant from the experience of most readers, Landsburg mines the details of daily life to reveal what the laws of economics tell us about ourselves.

Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

James Clear, an expert on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. He draws on proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.

Becoming

Becoming

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. Narrating with grace, good humor, and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family's history-making launch into the global limelight as well as their life inside the White House over eight momentous years - as she comes to know her country and her country comes to know her. In telling her story with honesty and boldness, she issues a challenge to the rest of us: Who are we and who do we want to become?

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Michael Lewis examines the causes of the U.S. stock market crash of 2008 and its relation to overpriced real estate, bad mortgages, shareholder demand for excessive profits, and the growth of toxic derivatives.

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

Two psychologists explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. Using their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that gives us a glimpse of our unconscious biases at work, the authors question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups shape our judgments about people's character, abilities, and potential.

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems.

Dare to Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts

Dare to Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts

Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential. When we dare to lead, we don't pretend to have the right answers. We stay curious and ask the right questions. We don't see power as finite and hoard it. We know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don't avoid difficult conversations and situations. We lean into vulnerability when it's necessary to do good work.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

In Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design.
 

Economics for the Common Good

Economics for the Common Good

When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a 'dismal science,' is a positive force for the common good.

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives - how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they explore the hidden side of, well - everything... If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.

Good Economics for Hard Times

Good Economics for Hard Times

Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

How To Be An Antiracist

How To Be An Antiracist

In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development to health care to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

An updated and expanded edition of the book that launched a global phenomenon, The Obstacle Is the Way presents an infinitely elastic formula for turning our toughest trials into our greatest triumphs. 

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all? Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and how leaders can fight groupthink to build cultures that welcome dissent.

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

Our Dollar, Your Problem argues that America's currency might not have reached today's lofty pinnacle without a certain amount of good luck. Drawing in part on his own experiences, including with policymakers and world leaders, Kenneth Rogoff animates the remarkable postwar run of the dollar - -how it beat out the Japanese yen, the Soviet ruble, and the euro - and the challenges it faces today from crypto and the Chinese yuan, the end of reliably low inflation and interest rates, political instability, and the fracturing of the dollar bloc.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society, from Van Gogh's sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer. Filled with indelible stories of real people, this book shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so.

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure - basic, complex, and intelligent - Amy showcases how to minimize unproductive failure while maximizing what we gain from flubs of all stripes.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

The bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people's minds, which can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life. Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Thinking Fast and Slow

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. He exposes the extraordinary capabilities, and also the faults and biases, of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do." Behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race

Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America.