12 Comments
User's avatar
Philip's avatar

No finance papers? I think Modigliani & Miller (1958), Sharpe (1964), Black & Scholes (1973), Merton (1973), Lucas (1978), and Mehra & Prescott (1985) should be part of the canon.

Expand full comment
Nicholas Decker's avatar

I chose to restrict it, by topics, to the ones that I felt I had anything to add. (Tbh, I want to cut some topics).

Expand full comment
Zarathustra's avatar

What textbook should those of us who know basically nothing about economics read to get a foundation in macro?

Expand full comment
Philip's avatar

High School - Mankiw

Intro College - Abel, Bernanke, and Croushore

Intermediate College / Intro Graduate School - Romer

Graduate School - Ljungqvist & Sargent / Stokey & Lucas (New Classical) / Gali (New Keynsian)

Expand full comment
Niv's avatar

You accidentally included this one twice in sources of growth: “Good Policy or Good Luck?”, Easterly, Kremer, Pritchett, Summers (1993)

Expand full comment
Rohit Shinde's avatar

I'm a hobbyist, not a grad student. But this will still get me to research frontier! Thanks for this list.

Expand full comment
Josh Zweig's avatar

That's quite a list ;)

Expand full comment
Josh Lerner's avatar

Really interesting list. Since I'm not an economist by training but trained in an adjacent field, I'm very interested in what the field has to offer in lots of areas I'm very unfamiliar with. But, and again, not trained as an economist so YMMV, but I'm surprised by the lack of new institutional economics here -- Douglass North, Elinor Ostrom, Barry Weingast, Oliver Williamson, among others. Also, not a lot of econometrics, which is surprising too (no Josh Angrist, Alberto Abadie, Susan Athey, or Guido Imbens, among hundreds of others). The credibility revolution is barely a footnote here. This is 100% just my perspective, since those are the schools of economic research I most directly engage with, but I also think some of the big "disputes" in economics are glossed over here with only one side chosen -- Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001), for example is pretty solidly in the midst of a big debate about the role of institutions in growth, and is somewhat controversial now for data/methods problems. Which does, of course, not diminish it's importance, but it should color your view of the whole literature a little -- there are also lots of papers from the same time with similar problems that aren't on the list, but were very important at the time too (like Leavitt's abortion paper for example), so that also seems like maybe a bit of an oversight.

Expand full comment
Nicholas Decker's avatar

I don’t regard new institutional economics as being worth much.

The econometrics is within empirical papers — it is better, in my view, to learn it from applications than from the theory.

I do not omit one side or another. You are just not familiar with the responses. “Do Institutions Cause Growth” and “Persistence of Fortune” are direct rebuttals to the AJR view. I include the starting point because it is an exceptional method, and it will inspire me as it inspires others.

Expand full comment
Alex's avatar

Macro is getting the stepchild treatment

Expand full comment
Nicholas Decker's avatar

The treatment by Integral d/s exists. Anyone interested in that can read through it.

Expand full comment