~~NOTOC~~ About me||economics|icone:home.png?100 Research||economics:research|icone:question.png?100 Teaching and more||economics:more|icone:exclamation.png?100 Italiano||italiano|icone:italiano.png?100 ====== A honest glossary of some Economics terminology ====== * "**//Agent Based Models//**": flexible economic models that can replicate actual economic phenomena, and much more * "**//behavioral economics//**": the study of the economy as if it was a human activity * "**//causality//**": a claim many papers allude to and some even have support for * "**//correlation//**": different from causal effect, but strongly correlated with it * "**//degrowth//**": politically unsustainable sustainability * "**//development economics//**": the subfield of economics which makes researchers feel rich (cf.: "**//finance//**") * "**//DSGE//**": complicated, oversimplified models of an economy * "**//econometrics//**": the art of using data to advance our understanding of economics (cf: "**//hardcore econometrics//**") * "**//econophysics//**": beautiful explanations of social phenomena without the inconvenience of having to understand them * "**//equilibrium//**": something we take as given because waiting for it would take infinite time * "**//exogenous//**": used both as a synonym of "independent variable", and to refer to that quality independent variables typically lack * "**//finance//**": a sector that according to pretty reasonable arguments should work reliably and not make anybody very rich * "**//game theory//**": the science of finding vaguely plausible real world occurrencies of very cool mathematical phenomena * "**//gender economics//**": the subfield of Economics with reversed gender imbalances * "**//Granger causality//**": the simplest way to introduce the word "causality" in your paper * "**//GDP//**": does not mean anything, the most obvious proxy of everything * "**//hardcore econometrics//**": the art of using data to advance our understanding of econometrics (cf: "**//econometrics//**") * "**//homo oeconomicus//**": something other people believe in (see also: "**//mainstream//**") * "**//instrumental variable//**": something you need to defend strenously if it's not worth much * "**//laissez-faire//**": loanword from French, hence sounding far more elegant than "anarchy" * "**//macroeconomics//**": the only real economics * "**//mainstream//**": colleagues who never cite my papers * "**//microeconomics//**": the only economics which is real * "**//model//**": a description of how the world should be in order for economists to understand it * "**//money//**": a good that has no other use * "**//natural disaster//**": a terrible thing, if you are not an applied economist (see also: "//**instrumental variable**//") * "**//resilient//**": unexpectedly surviving our inability to protect it * "**//returns to scale//**": typically positive, unless you're talking to economics undergraduate students * "**//shareholder//**": ultimate responsible of bad thing a firm does, with the (possible) exception of bad things it does to its shareholders * "**//stakeholder//**": someone who has interest in something but has no rights, power, and typically merits over it (cf.: **//shareholder//**). * "**//statistical significance//**": something that published papers eventually end up reaching