Economics Writing Competitions: How to Find Paper, Data, and Ideas

There are simply way too many economics writing competitions. Both Harvard and Berkeley have student-run econ writing competitions. I think Cambridge also has one. John Locke and Whole Brain Scholars have econ category in their prompts. Marshall is also a dedicated econ competition, but I can no longer recommend them because they take money from a tutor service company.

This is a problem because high school students generally do not know how to write econ papers. Not because they do not have enough training. They have been taught some useful models but not how to apply them to analyze actual novel problems. So, most economic papers submitted, or even those that received awards, are just a mesh of social and behavioral qualitative analysis.

This is a missed opportunity because you could actually learn a lot by doing rigorous quantitative reasoning alongside qualitative analysis. Therefore, in this article, I will discuss tools that can help you do that.

Some of you may think that all these can be done by AI. If you have tried, you would know that it can't be. Papers and ideas found by AI have exceptionally low quality. They are fine when you know nothing about the subject and are trying to warm up for the big league, which is basically the first 30 minutes or so of your research.

Econ Paper Database (Not the Common Ones)

1. RePEc (Research Papers in Economics). Use IDEAS to search and download papers.
2. EconPapers and NBER. Use these to read working papers.
3. Journal of Economic Perspectives. Easiest to read among all flagship journals. The symposium is also a great place to find review articles of specific subfields.
4. Annual Review of Economics. Same as JEP. "Each year, Annual Reviews critically reviews the most significant primary research literature to guide you to the principal contributions of the field and help you keep up to date in your area of research." Free Access.

State of Economy

1. FRED. You got to FRED! Flagship database run by the St. Louis Fed. More than 800,000 variables and you can edit the charts.
2. Economic Report of the President. Council of Economic Advisers’ annual report to the president. So you can bet it is easy to rea. Data are included in the appendix. It even explains the core concepts.
3. Beige Book. Fed’s reports on the status of the economy. Useful insights and ideas.
4. Congressional Budget Office. Fiscal data.
5. Eurostat. EU data. For monetary data, go to ECB Data Portal.

Recession Indicators

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. US payroll, labor force participation, unemployment data.
2. Bureau of Economic Analysis. All the data for Y = C + G + I + NX.
3. Institute for Supply Management Reports. Monthly PMI data.
4. GDP Now.

Household Related Data

1. The Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) program provides data on expenditures, income, and demographic characteristics of consumers in the United States.
2. Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. Information on these individuals and their descendants has been collected continuously, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics. The PSID is directed by faculty at the University of Michigan, and the data are available on this website without cost to researchers and analysts.
3. The Health and Retirement Study.
4. The Survey on Income and Program Participation.
5. The Survey of Consumer Finances. The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is normally a triennial cross-sectional survey of U.S. families. The survey data include information on families' balance sheets, pensions, income, and demographic characteristics.

Data on Health, Education, Crime, and Standard of Living

1. International Education Statistics. No longer updated but contains useful links.
2. Education Policy and Data Center. "The EPDC has the world’s largest international education database with over 3.8 million data points from 200 countries. The data comes from national and international websites including household survey datasets as well as studies and reports." Data up to 2020.
3. World Bank EdStats Portal.
4. CDC Wonder.
5. Terra Populus integrates the world’s population and environmental data, including: population censuses and surveys; land cover information from remote sensing; climate records from weather stations; land use records from statistical agencies.

Data on International Trade and Development

1. World Integrated Trade Solution.
2. Penn World Tables. The Penn World Tables provides national income accounts-type of variables converted to international prices. The homogenization of national accounts to a common numeraire allows valid comparisons of income among countries.
3. B-Ready. Used to be called the Doing Business Indicator. But then scandals hit.
4. World Value Survey.
5. The Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) aims to inform policymaking in low- and middle-income countries through a unique system of longitudinal surveys designed to improve the understanding of livelihoods and welfare. It is housed in the World Bank Development Data Group.
6. The Pacific Exchange Rate Service of UBC’s Saunders Business School has historical data on bilateral exchange rates for a large number of currencies, available for research and teaching purposes.
7. International Finance Statistics.
8. FAOSTAT. Time series data on food production, agricultural trade, forest products, and fisheries from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for a wide variety of countries.

Data on Public Finance and Inequality

1. World Tax Database. Data on tax rates and tax revenues for different types of taxes for the U.S., U.S. states, and various countries around the world for a large number of years.
2. World Inequality Database (formerly Top Incomes Database). A database of long-term historical data on the shares of national incomes going to the top of the income distribution in each of a large number of different countries, derived from income tax return data.  Assembled by Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.
3. UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database. Data on Gini coefficients and shares of income going to different parts of the income distribution for a very large number of countries and years.
4. International Center for Tax and Development "Government Revenue Dataset." Data on government revenue for a very large set of countries over multiple years.

Where to Look for Ideas

1. VoxDev. Very analytical articles with loads of references and data. VoxDev, VoxEU are all recommended
2. Development Impact. Maintained by world bank economists.
3. Microeconomics Insight. Frontier micro research.

Data Visualization

1. You should mainly stick with textbook models unless a more advanced model is absolutely necessary for the analysis and you can fully explain how this model works.​
2. Here you should be fine using AI to touch up your graphs for aesthetics. Check with the organizers of your competition.