Reading Recommendations from the Economics Faculty

Fall 2023

Book Recommendations

• My Journeys in Economic Theory, by Edmund Phelps 
• Power and Progress: Our Thousand Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
• The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by Martin Wolf 
• Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World, by Ha-Joon Chang
• Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, by Dan Ariely

Fall 2022

Book Recommendations

Recommended by Professors Natalia Czap and Hans Czap:

• Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy (2022), Elizabeth Popp Berman (UM-AA professor) 
• Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation” (2022), Ayelet Fishbach
• The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters (2021), Eric J. Johnson
• Hard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick (2021), Russell A. Poldrack
• Nudge: The Final Edition (update to the 2008 bestseller) (2021), Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein
• Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It (2021), Cass R. Sunstein

Podcasts:

• No Stupid Questions (2022), Episode 93 “Does the Early Bird Really Catch the Worm? Or Could the Night Owl Get There First?”
• Freakonomics Radio (2022), Episode 503 “What Is the Future of College — and Does It Have Room for Men?”

Book Recommendations

Recommended by Prof. Ilir Miteza:

• Home in the World: A Memoir (2022), Amartya Sen
• Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021), Adam Tooze
• A Brief History of Equality (2022), Thomas Piketty and Steven Rendall
• 21st Century Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve from the Great Inflation to COVID-19 (2022), Ben Bernanke 
• Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us (2022), Russ Roberts

Fall 2021

Book Recommendations

Recommended by Professor Suzanne Bergeron:

• Democracy, Race, and Justice, edited by Nina Banks. An important recovery of a neglected voice in the History of Economic Thought: a book of essays by the first Black American to get a Ph.D. in Economics, Sadie T. M. Alexander. 

Recommended by Professors Natalia Czap and Hans Czap:

• How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to be, Katy Milkman (2021).
• Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein (2021).

Recommended by Professor Ilir Miteza:

• The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets (A story about the re-emergence of monopolistic capitalism in the United States), Thomas Philippon (2019). 
• Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation, Edward L. Glaeser (2021).

Recommended by Professor Bruce Pietrykowski:

• Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford (Yale University Press, 2021).

Other reading recommendations (from Profs. Natalia Czap and Hans Czap)

The Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy published a third special issue on COVID-19. One of the articles stands out: “Unequal unemployment effects of COVID-19 and monetary policy across U.S. States” by Hakan Yilmazkuday presents evidence suggesting that on the national level the majority of unemployment effects in the short and long run were driven by the pandemic while the influence of monetary policy was rather minimal. On the state level, there is evidence of unequal unemployment effects of COVID-19 across U.S. states. The national monetary policy had a distributive effect: while it reduced unemployment in some states, it did not affect unemployment in the other states. The uniqueness of this investigation is that it was based on U.S. data on Google trends capturing developments in unemployment, interest rates, and inflation, which was complemented by the conventional data on Federal Funds Rate from the Federal Reserve System.   

The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management recently published the article “Behavioral spillover effects from a social information campaign” by Fredrik Carlsson, Marcela Jaime, and Clara Villegas. The authors show that a social information campaign on water use in Colombia, in which households were informed on their individual water use and their water consumption relative to other households, and also received a rating of their usage, reduced water consumption significantly. This is in line with results from previous behavioral research and underlines the importance and effectiveness of non-monetary approaches on environmental issues. Interestingly and importantly, the authors also found positive spillovers on electricity consumption - the campaign on reducing water usage also led to a significant decrease in the rate of electricity consumption.