Economic Research
There are tens of thousands of
economists doing research everyday. They study everything from whether
or not minorities get treated fairly by banks to whether school vouchers do
a good job at helping disadvantaged children.
If you know where to look (and I'm
about to show you), you can get at this research for free. In fact,
most of it is posted to the web in easily downloaded working papers months
if not years before it gets formally published in journals or books.
Better yet, it's now easy to search
for papers that'll interest you. So click through to some of these
links and find out the very latest about exactly what you want to know.
EconPapers.org
This site uses the RePEc (Research
Papers in Economics) database, which is maintained by over 100 volunteers in
44 countries. As of the moment I'm writing this, you can find out all
about 300,000 papers and books. Better yet, the full text of 200,000
of them are posted to the net and you can download them for free. (Horray!) In addition, the database is fully searchable, so you can quickly get to
relevant papers.
EconLit
One of the problems with RePEc is that
it is only about a decade old. As such, it doesn't store older
research. To search through that, you're going to want to get your
hands on EconLit. Most public libraries (and pretty much all
universities) have access to it. So if you need to search for older
papers, get to a library computer and click through to EconLit. (The
link above only takes you to a page that tells you about EconLit.)
JSTOR
JSTOR has gone back and scanned in
copies of all the most important journals--not just for economics but for
all disciplines. But, again, you're going to have to go to a library
to use it. The link above will get you to their site but you won't be
able to download papers unless you're using a computer that has access
because somebody (e.g. a university library) bought a subscription for it.
World Bank
Working Papers
The World Bank has a huge army of
Ph.D.'s doing all sorts of nifty research. Because these guys work for
the world bank, they typically publish their initial findings in the World
Bank's own working papers series before submitting them to scholarly
journals. So if you have any interest in economic development, international
trade, or international investment, you should take a peek here. In
addition to several thousand old and new working papers, you can also find
direct access to lots of interesting reports that the World Bank publishes.
IMF
Working Papers
The International Monetary Fund
publishes a huge amount of stuff including an excellent working paper
series. Just like the World Bank, it has a small army of Ph.D.'s doing
research on all sorts of interesting topics related to economic development
and international issues. The link above will get you to the search
page where you can do a keyword search that goes through everything they
publish. Direct links to the working papers and all other IMF
publications are on the right hand side of the search page.
Google.com
The Google search engine is a wonderful resource.
A trick I like to use when hunting for economic papers and actual research
is to not only search for the terms I'm interested in ("economic
development") but also the term ".pdf". The reason this is helpful is
because most academics post thier working papers and recent research on
their websites using pdf files (Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document
Format). Throwing ".pdf" into the search tends to narrow down
the results to just research papers.
