Faculty of Economics and Social Science

Internet Resources on Economics

Document 2

 

Hypertext Guides and Lists to Economics Resources on the Web

As I noted in Document I of this series, the quantity of economics related resources on the Internet is extensive. Although there are various Web pages which allude to the availability of guides to economics resources on the Web, this is something of a misnomer. I have been able to track down only one which is comprehensive and is annotated sufficiently extensively to merit the designation guide. This is Bill Goffe's Resources for Economists on the Internet. It is updated regularly,thirteen having been published by June 1996. This document is very detailed, the twelfth edition having been subdivided into 49 main categories, as detailed in the linked document. The guide itself can be downloaded from the following sites:

The first two sites include a search engine which enables you to enter a search string which will point you to those parts of the guide where it is included, if any. Given that the document is very detailed, running to some 100 A4 pages, a search engine is helpful. Due to the size of the document, more than 300,000 bytes, if you want to copy it to disk during peak daytime Internet usage (11:00-18:00 GMT) it is advisable to do so using a ftp program, the site address being:

ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/sci.econ.research/econ-resources-faq.

Any economist who wants to keep abreast of the resources accessible from Web sites in this discipline will benefit from scrutinising this document periodically.

Although there are other guides of a general or specific nature, these should more properly be referred to as hypertext lists than guides, consisting, as they do, of one or more screenfulls of links, generally to documents at other sites which contain resources for economists, or yet further links. The University of Michigan's Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides, includes a number of guides which focus on business, finance, and international trade, although no others with as extensive coverage as Goffe on economics resources. Most of those included tend to focus on specialized fields, particularly business and finance. Moreover, unlike Goffe's guide, which is annotated throughout, the Michigan Clearinghouse guides tend to be long lists of hypertext links. Many of them include links to general Internet resources (eg., search engines) and overlap to varying degrees with related guides. Among the best that I have found is probably the LEAD (Leadership for Development and Trade) guide to Sources of Trade Information, which provides a number of links to resources dealing with international trade, the most important link being to the International Trade Law site at the University of Tromsø which includes a comprehensive and well organised series of links to various resources relating to international trade, as well as international trading law.

Among lists of economics resources, the three most useful are those retrievable from Yahoo, Rice University, and the World Internet Directory:

As these lists are updated all the time, it is worthwhile periodically accessing the sites and downloading the most recent version, as I will only be able to update the information myself irregularly.

 

ECONOMICS RESOURCES: MULTIPLE TOPIC SITES

At some point `guides' to resources which appear in hypertext format on the Web merge imperceptibly into what Goffe refers to as multiple and single subject economic sites. Although I retain the distinction here between lists and sites, from the perspective of the user the distinction is somewhat obtuse. Whereas a guide such as Goffe's, is a work of some scholarship, lists are generally directly or indirectly the byproducts of search engines, and single and multipurpose sites are links which are arranged around particular themes, and organised spacially and hierarchically somewhat differently from lists. As many of the resources indicated at these sites are in fact loaded, not on the servers of that site, but elswhere on the Internet, for all practical purposes the distinction between list and site is not, to my mind, a particularly important one. A slightly more meaningful distinction is that between networks and sites. In this context a network consists of a number of interrelated hypertext projects anchored on the same discipline area, located at a number of different main sites.

The most important network of economics resources currently on the Web is NetEc, originally located at the Manchester Computing Center. The site is mirrored at Washington University St.Louis. The network is currently composed of four hubs:

BibEc is a massive undertaking and a major resource. It is a bibliographic database consisting currently (13/06/96) of 39,192 records of working papers in economics. It is collected from the large number of series arranged in the attached list. If you want to scrutinise the nature of the publications which appear in a particular series, just follow the links by selecting the series, and the year/volume. You will be presented with bibliographical information which includes the title, the authors, key words, and length of the publication. So, for instance, the Boston University-Center for Latin American Development Studies working papers for 1988 included one entitled Trade Policy Under Imperfect Competition: A Simulation Exercise for Chile by R E Saez. Selecting the link returns the attached bibliographic details. Most economists will wish to use the search engine in order to locate working papers on themes which are of interest. For the search string Chile the following list was returned, number 25 of which corresponds to the original article obtained by choosing the series, year, etc. The search engine, therefore, appears to be remarkably efficient. It is necessary to remember to select the appropriate database from the list in the dialog box on the search engine page. If you choose alternative databases you will, of course, end up with different compilations of working papers.

The WoPEc database currently (12/06/96) includes records relating to some 2030 working papers in economics. These are drawn from a list of 126 series of working papers. The major difference between WoPEc and BibEc is that the Working Paper in Economics database records provide links to the full document, whereas BibEc provides only links to bibliographical information about the document. [It was still somewhat difficult to actually glean this from the information provided in the home pages of either of these databases on 11/06/96.] Following a link through from the list of serials, for instance, Papers of the Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association, will download a list of papers included in the database from that series. Any paper selected from the list will download, in turn, bibliographical material relating to that particular selection. Unlike the information included in BibEc, an abstract is included, as well as the URL of the site from which the paper can be downloaded in full, as in the attached example. The heading Format indicates the type of application/viewer necessary to view the document which has been downloaded. Invariably this is a Postscript or Adobe Acrobat reader. Both are available for downloading on the Internet. For procedures see the document on Advanced Internet Applications. Like BibEc, the WoPEc database has an associated search engine which can be used to track down working papers available on the Internet which include discussion of particular topics or issues.

The CodEc component of NetEc provides links to computer software resources which are of interest to economists and econometricians. The list of software programs currently (12/06/96) available is that listed in the attached document.

The last component of NetEc is WebEc. The associated document lists links to a very substantial range of economics resources, and is the most comprehensive collation of economics related links currently available on the Internet. Its scope can be gleaned from the list of main categories listed below.

][ Economics and Teaching ][ Methodology and History of Economic Thought ][ Mathematical and Quantitative Methods ][ Economics and Computing ][ Economics Data ][ Microeconomics ][ Macroeconomics ][ International Economics ][ Financial Economics ][ Public Economics ][ Health, Education and Welfare ][ Labor and Demographics ][ Law and Economics ][ Industrial Organization ][ Business Economics ][ Economic History ][ Economic Development, Technological Change and Growth ][ Economic Systems ][ Agriculture and Natural Resources ][ Regional Economics ][ Economics of Networks ][

][ Libraries ][ Institutions ][ Publishing ][ Information Systems ][ Communication ][ Guides ][ Internet and Commerce ][ Reference Shelf ][ Social Sciences ][

Each of these main categories is subdivided into subcategories. The collection of links is simply too massive to show in its entirety. To illustrate the scope, however, suffice it to look at one of the more interesting headings, that of Economics Data. This is subdivided into the following sub-headings:

The scope of information available can be gleaned from the attached listing of links that is subsumed under these headings. Many of these links, in turn, track lengthy lists of resources which are subsumed under the particular heading in this list, as well as pointing to additional resources for economists which are not directly mentioned in the WebEc index. Anyone who follows even a limited number of these links as far as they can lead soon concludes that, at least in quantitative terms, the material currently accessible on the Internet is very significant. And....it is still very early days, many of these resources having been uploaded in the last two years.

FINWeb

FINWeb, a Financial Economics WWW Server, aims to list Internet resources providing substantive information concerning economics and finance-related topics, and is a major collation of links to such resources. Although not as comprehensive as WebEc, it contains a significant number of useful links, some of which, of course, overlap those accessible from other networks and link pages. Resources accessible from FINWeb are briefly annotated. The main categories under which the links are subsumed are:

VIBES [Virtual International Business and Economic Resources]

VIBES is compiled by Jeanie M Welch who is an International Business Subject Specialist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Some indication of the comprehensiveness, coverage and arrangement of links is the award to this home page of the Dun and Bradsheet 1996 Online Championship. Although the primary theme of the topics around which the links are organised is that of international business, there are many links to information and data series of interest to economists interested in other fields of the discipline. The links to other sites are arranged in three categories:

ECONOMICS RESOURCES: SPECIALISED TOPIC SITES

There are a significant number of sites which collate links, or include documents [articles, newletters, data series] which focus on economics sub-discipline areas. Section 30 of Volume 1, No.12 of Goffe's guide lists some of the most important. As this document is not intended to be encyclopaedic, and as what is available is changing regularly, I shall restrict myself to comments and references to some of those sites which are particularly comprehensive in their coverage, and/or which list other specialised single subject economics resources sites. Anyone interested in topics which I do not include should find little difficulty tracking them down, either from the sites mentioned, or by using one of the more powerful search engines, such as Alta Vista or Lycos. The caveat I made earlier in connection with guides and lists, applies here as well: there are few `sites' which restrict themselves to resources or links on one subject. `Multiple' and `single' subject sites are merely changeable points on the same continua.

Agricultural Economics

The Agricultural Economics Virtual Library is maintained by Jason Beddow at Texas Tech University. Its objective is to provide a starting point for those interested in agricultural economics. The page provides an extensive collection of links to various resources, including journals, agricultural mailing lists and newsgroups, agricultural markets, agricultural associations, international documents/agreements of relevance, such as GATT and NAFTA, links to departments of agricultural economics in colleges and universities, agricultural trade data sets, agricultural statistics of various countries, and statistics of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, to mention just some of the major resource categories.

Banking

There are a substantial number of banking related resources availabel on the Web. One of the best link pages is from the Institut für Betriebswirtschaftliche Geldwirtschaft in Göttingen. This provides links to the sites of specific banks arranged by region and country. As noted in an earlier section, many banks provide online analyses of the national or regional economies in which they are situated, and are, therefore, useful sources for such information. Some of the links are annotated, giving information on some of the resources available at particular sites. Another link provides access to academic research information on banking, much of which, however, is in German. The Center for Banking Studies at the University of Charlotte, North Carolina, supplies links to other banks on the Internet, to banking and finance research and statistics links, and bank regulatory agencies on the Internet. Also found at this site is information on the Stanford Bank Game, a software package that simulates the operations of a commercial bank, based on the decisions of management teams. The Göttingen site also includes information on banking and finance in electronic media, some of the references overlapping those I provided earlier in the section on current economics news and economics journals.

Economic Growth Resources

Links to economic growth resources are provided by Jonathan Temple, Nuffield College Oxford. Resources signposted under the following headings:

The resources placed online by the World Bank are also worthy of scrutiny. Its Trends in Developing Economies, provide brief reports on most of the World Bank's borrowing countries. These reports are supplementary to the World Bank's country studies series:

The text is descriptive. It is mainly concerned with current events and the recent past in each country, but also places events in context by bringing out the distinguishing characteristics of a country's economy, its problems and prospects, and the principal elements of its development strategy. While the choice of topics may vary from one country text to another, recurrent themes are government initiatives in progress or under consideration, economic and social factors affecting development, and the external debt situation.

The text report is accompanied by tables of economic indicators, the linked technical notes providing details of the concepts and data collection processes. At present access, on an experimental basis, is through the CIESIN (Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network) gateway, which provides a search engine for accessing the information. The user types in the name of the country and a specific topic (eg., adjustment program, balance of payments, economic reform program), or can use a free text search, and then submits the query. It is possible to select more than one country/topic simultaneously. However, the search engine does not return data for all the topics for each country, and for some of the topics, it returns only reports on a few countries, sometimes only one country. If you enter a country name, and select No Specific Topic, it will return information relating to all the topics in the list that it has records for in its database for that country.

Economics of Networks

There are two sites which currently concentrate on this theme. Nicholas Economides maintains a home page on the server of the Stern Business School at New York University, with the title Economics of Networks. In addition to the text of his Economics of Networks, there are documents/research papers dealing with various issues which he subsumes under the heading `economics of networks', which includes the Internet, telephone, fax, transport, and financial networks. The two main categories of papers available are on networks, compatibility and related issues, and financial networks and electronic trading. All the articles are written by the very prolific Nicholas Economides, sometimes with the collaboration of others, originally published in such journals as the American Economic Review, Journal of Industrial Economics, European Economic Review, and the European Journal of Political Economy. There is also an interactive bibliography, and the June 1996 Special Issue of The International Journal of Industrial Organization on Network Economics. The documents can either be downloaded, or the abstracts read on line.

Another Web presentation which deals with issues relating to the economics of networks, is the page of Hal Varian, currently Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley. The home page is entitled the Information Economy The subjects covered are the economics of the Internet, information goods, intellectual property and related issues. The papers of the Internet Economics Workshop, held at MIT, include an introduction to the economics of the Internet, a series of papers on the econonmics of digital networks, papers on Internet resource allocation and pricing models, requirements for pricing Internet services, network interconnecton and Internet economics, and more besides. There are articles distributed on various of the pages of this Web presentation dealing with business,economic, legal and other aspects of the Internet, an invaluable collection for situating discussions about the Internet in its political and economic context. As it seems quite clear that in the not to distant future the Economics of the Internet will merit the status of sub-discipline area, this is a very good launching pad for obtaining an appreciation of the economic, political and legal issues involved.

Game Theory and Experimental Economics

There is a very extensive list of resources on game theory and experimental economics on Al Roth's page at the University of Pittsburgh. The first part of the page incudes links to numerous articles on the subject of game theory and experimental economics authored either by Roth, or Roth and associates. Also available are bibliographies on two-sided matching, learning in games, minimax trees, and the table of contents of The Handbook of Experimental Economics edited by John H Kagel and Al Roth, as well as the very extensive bibliography (1995) on bargaining experiments and related papers which is included in that volume. There are links to other centres where economists specialise in experimental economics and game theory, where other resources are accessible online:

Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making at the University of Amsterdam.
Economic Science Lab at the University of Arizona.
Experimental Economics Project at the University of Bonn, (which is part of the Economic Theory project) directed by Professor Reinhard Selten. (They make available some of their basic experimental software.)
Dan Friedman and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have some pages on Learning and Experimental Economics.
Charlie Plott has a description of his experimental work and career at the very active center of experimental economics at Cal Tech.
Experimental Economics Laboratory at the University of East Anglia Bob Sugden, Chris Starmer, Judith Mehta, Robin Cubitt, and Alistair Munro are here.
Experimental Economics Laboratory at McMaster University is directed by Stuart Mestelman and Andrew Muller.
Experimental Economics Research Program at the University of New Mexico. Mike McKee, Philip Ganderton, David Brookshire, Bob Berrens, and Stuart Burness are here.
&127; Tatsuyoshi Saijo at Osaka University makes some of his papers available, in English and Japanese.
Glenn Harrison at the University of South Carolina has started to put some information up on his page.
Timothy Cason at the University of Southern California has abstracts of some of his experimental papers up on his page.
John Van Huyck at Texas A&M University has been doing a lot of interesting work much of which is now available on his Game Theory and Experimental Economics page.
Computable and Experimental economics lab at the University of Trento.
Experimental Economics and Applied Game Theory at the University of Wyoming.
Experimental economics listserver.set up by the Centre of Experimental Economics at the University of York.
Centre for Experimental Economics at the University of York.(So far this location just contains the contact addresses for the directors, John Hey and Graham Loomes...)

John Van Huyck's Games Theoy and Experimental Economics home page at Texas A&M University, contains quite detailed abstracts,with accompanying bibliographies of the numerous papers he has published alone, or with others, on game theory and experimental economics. Among the links on his page is one to the home page of Eric Rasmusen's home page at Indiana University. Although the size of the font on Rasmusen's pages will probably necessitate the need to alter the font on your browser to read it, there is an interesting link to the raw data used by Charles Murray in his controversial book The Bell Curve. Also loaded here is the text of Rasmusen's book Games and Information, although not in a format which is always easy to read. Rasmusen includes a wealth of materials on his pages, including numerous working papers. Some of these are of interest to non-economists as well, such as the Presidential Election Data page.

Jim Ratcliffe of the University of Arizona has a useful page with interesting resources on game theory. Included are introductory explanations on what game theory is, including the Game Theory and Prisoner's Dilemma entries in the Principia Cybernetica, a project the aim of which is to tackle age-old philosophical problems with the help of the most recent cybernetic theories and technologies. Jim Ratcliffe includes a list of games theory journals, Internet sources of game theory papers, and a link to the games theory and information working papers at Econ WPA. Full text versions of a significant number of papers are avaialable online. Another useful category is that of courses on game theory provided at various institutions. In addition to details of courses, there are also syllabi, probelms and answers, and reading lists. A good illustration is that of David Levine's Dynamic Game Theory at UCLA. Roger A McCain's Conflict,Cooperation, and Rationality: An Intrduction to Game Theory is also quite useful.

Health Economics

Ansgar Hebborn maintains a collection of links to health economics resources at the University of Bayreuth. These include journals, mailing lists, the WHO Partners for Health Database on Health Reform and various papers under the heading Case Studies and Health Management from the John F Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard. The Institutions section includes a link to the WHO gopher Health Economics which features bibliographical material on health economics, a guide to WHO literature, information about the WHO Task Force on Health Economics, a lengthy paper on Identification of Needs in Health Economics in Developing Countries, a paper on Privatization in Health, as well as one authored by Warford on Environment, Health and Sustainable Development : The Role of Economic Instruments and Policies. Another useful site is the Health Economics Research Group at Brunel University, Middlesex. In addition to the usual Links to Health Related Sites, there is a listing of HERG Research and Discussion Papers, some of which can be downloaded, although these are very much in a minority of the total. Information on current research projects, and staff details and research interests are also provided.

Patti Peeple's Guide to Health Economics, Medical and Pharmacy Resources on the Net, collates links to a wide variety of resources. The Pharmacy provides links to resources on drugs which should satisfy the needs of anyone who needs to know anything about pharmaceutical substances. The page on Medical Libraries is useful for those wishing to track down blibliographic resources on health economics, including (15/06/96) links to 130 sites. Among the databases linked to is the California Health Data Base Inventory, which contains information on over 125 data bases currently maintained by 10 Health and Welfare Agency departments or programs.

It is available in printed form and in a software program that allows anyone with a personal computer running DOS to sort and search for information in the inventory. The software program is available in a compressed file from this web site and can be downloaded. Access via California Health Information for Policy Home Page.

Also listed are various Health-Related Associations, most of them American. The Other Interesting Sites page also deserves examination, containing many valuable and interesting links, including the Virtual Hospital, which Peeple's describes as one of the best medical sites on the Net.

International Trade

There are extensive resources relating to international trade dispersed over numerous sites on the Internet. Important collations of links pointing to these can be found at the followng sites:

Quantitative Marcroeconomics and Real Business Cycle Theory

This site, maintained by Christian Zimmerman of the Université du Québec à Montréal, collates materials relating to quantitative macroeconomics and real business cycle theory. Much of the data available is in the form of links to the home pages of economists working in these fields, where you can find papers and data series which can be downloaded. For instance, John Hassler, of the Institute for International Economic Studies at the University of Stockholm, includes on his home page the following articles:

"Risk and Consumption", Postscript forthcoming in Swedish Economic Policy Review
"Fluctuation Risk in an Aggregated Ss-model", Postscript
"Variations in Risk and Fluctuations in Demand - a theoretical model" , Postscript forthcoming in&127; Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control June 1996
"Regime Shifts and Volatility Spillovers on International Stock Markets", Postscript
"Optimal Actuarial Fairness in Pension Systems - a note" together with Assar Lindbeck. Postscript

Also included at the site is Swedish Macro Data covering the years 1861-1988, and comprehensive lecture notes on such themes as differential equations, dynamic opitimization in continuous time, consumption and investment under uncertainty, asset pricing, and real business cycles.

Not all the sites listed in the directory of macro-economists with home pages are equally fullsome. Some, although listing published papers, provide only abstracts, whereas in some other instances the papers can be downloaded. Zimmerman includes a directory which provides email and Web addresses of some 78 macroeconomists worldwide, listing their institutional addresses, and specific interests, useful for those seeking advise, contacts, or information. The Papers Online page provides information of links to Web pages where papers in macroeconomics and real business cycle theory can be downloaded, as well as links to a number of institutions conducting this type of research where online papers are also available. Another important link is to the Economics Working Paper Archive (Econ WPA) pages on GE (general equilibrium), Growth, and Math Methods(C6, D5, D9), and Macroeconomics (E) where abstracts of deposited papers are available, as well as links to sites from which they can be downloaded.

Internet Resources on Economics Document I

Document compiled by Dr S D Stein
19/08/98
Stuart.Stein@uwe.ac.uk
©S.D Stein

ESS Home Page