Research Resources

Tools, textbooks, courses — various useful links.

General

• Kagi — a paid ad-free search engine with bells and whistles
• Obsidian — take notes
• Bear — take notes
• Overleaf — collaborative LaTeX
• Mermaid — draw diagrams
• Airtable — no-code database builder with a spreadsheet interface
• Toggl — tracking your time
• Zapier — automating stuff
• Julia Evans on How to Ask Good Questions
• Trey Causey's Do You Have Time for a Quick Chat?
• Chicago Booth Clark Center Panels — regularly polls three diverse panels of expert economists
• VoxDevLits — living literature reviews on policy-relevant topics in development economics
• Ungated Research — publicly available working papers for research in leading economics journals

Coding & Data

• [book] R for Data Science 2e
• [book] Kieran Healy's The Plain Person's Guide to Plain Text Social Science
• Quarto — "An open-source scientific and technical publishing system"
• RStudio Desktop IDE
• Positron on GitHub IDE
• GitHub — version control
• GitLab — version control
• [paper] Karl Broman & Kara Woo on Data Organization in Spreadsheets
• [paper] Hadley Wickham's Tidy Data
• Julia Evans' Oh Shit, Git! zine

Methods & Stats

• How are econometric methods applied by researchers in development economics? | VoxDev Blog
• [book] Ethan Bueno de Mesquita & Anthony Fowler's Thinking Clearly with Data
• [book] Joshua Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke's Mastering 'Metrics
• [book] Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics
• [book] Aki Vehtari, Andrew Gelman, & Jennifer Hill's Regression and Other Stories
• [paper] Andrew Gelman, Aki Vehtari and others on Bayesian Workflow
• [book] Jeffrey Wooldridge's Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach
• [book] Nick Huntington-Klein's The Effect
• [book] Scott Cunningham's Causal Inference: The Mixtape
• [paper] Susan Athey & Guido W. Imbens' Machine Learning Methods That Economists Should Know About
• [book] Dani Rodrik's Economics Rules
• [paper] Angus Deaton & Nancy Cartwright's Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials
• [book] Graeme Blair, Alexander Coppock, & Macartan Humphreys' Research Design in the Social Sciences
• [paper] Sayash Kapoor and others — REFORMS: Consensus-based Recommendations for Machine-learning-based Science
• [book] Chester Ismay and Albert Kim's ModernDive Statistical Inference via Data Science in R
• [book] Geocomputation with R — geographic data analysis, visualization and modeling by Robin Lovelace, Jakub Nowosad and Jannes Muenchow. See also the geocompx project
• [paper] Natalie Ayers, Gary King and others: Statistical Intuition Without Coding (or Teachers)
• Seeing Theory — interactive stats 101 visualizations
• Common statistical tests are linear models by Jonas Kristoffer Lindeløv
• IZA's methods write-ups
• Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) Methods Guides
• The World Bank's Curated List on Technical Topics
• J-PAL's Research Resources

Data Collection

• J-PAL's resource on survey programming (small contribution by me)
• SurveyCTO — see also the free Community Subscription
• J-PAL's Repository of measurement and survey design resources

Dataviz

• From data to viz — leads you to the most appropriate graph for your data, with code and common caveats
• RawGraphs
• Tableau (public)
• Datawrapper
• Flourish
• Data Visualization Society
• J-PAL's resource on data visualization (small contribution by me)
• Data by Design — "An Interactive History of Data Visualization"
• Frank Elavsky's Chartability — heuristics for accessible data visualizations

LLMs

Tools for coding with LLMs

• Claude Code
• OpenAI Codex
• OpenCode

Understanding LLMs

• The Financial Times' Generative AI exists because of the transformer
• Transformer Explainer — interactive visualization for learning about Transformers through GPT-2
• Andrej Karpathy's Intro to Large Language Models — an accessible one-hour overview
• Quanta Magazine: When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History — on the state of NLP

Ways of conceptualising LLMs

• Sam Barrett's Amplifiers of Epistemic Posture
• Ted Chiang's ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web
• Anthropic: Considerations in constructing Claude's character — and Patrick House's complement: The Lifelike Illusions of A.I.

Practical guides and workflows

• LLM style tips — Matthew Honnibal on getting better outputs
• Claude Code: My Workflow — a potential research/academic workflow by Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna
• Simon Willison: Agentic engineering patterns
• Oxide Computer: Using LLMs at Oxide — reflections on using LLMs responsibly within an organisation

Critical perspectives and general reading

• [book] AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor — see also A Guide to Understanding AI as Normal Technology
• Vicki Boykis's list of "no-hype" reads on LLMs
• Jessica Hullman: When are AI/ML models unlikely to help with decision-making?
• Simon Willison: The Lethal Trifecta
• Simon Couch: An interesting breakdown of AI energy use — a rough calculation of personal usage and how to put it in perspective

Staying up to date

• Simon Willison's blog
• VoxDev: AI and Development Economics — Early Evidence and How to Keep Up — resources compiled for keeping up with what's going on from a development economics perspective

NLP

• [book] Emil Hvitfeldt and Julia Silge's Supervised Machine Learning for Text Analysis in R
• [book] Julia Silge and David Robinson's Text Mining with R
• The STM R package for structural topic modelling
• The textnets R package
• The Quanteda R package for working with text data
• BERTopic — Python package for topic modelling with embeddings
• spaCy and their demo projects for text categorization or custom Named Entity Recognition

Courses

• Harvard's CS50: Introduction to Computer Science
• Harvard's CS50: Introduction to R
• Grant McDermott's Data science for economists
• EconDL — blog on deep learning applications in economics

Writing

• [book] Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style — see also Katy Waldman's review The Hedonic Appeal of "Dreyer's English"
• [book] Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing
• [book] The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition

Fitness

• [book] Casey Johnston's LIFTOFF: Couch to Barbell — a great starting point for weight lifting
• Megan Gallagher's Stronger by the Day — focused on the three main compound lifts, progressive overload at its core
• Macrofactor — no-nonsense nutrition tracker with a useful projection model