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economic_glossary

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
  • correlation”: different from causal effect, but strongly correlated with it
  • 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 fine 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
  • 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
economic_glossary.txt · Ultima modifica: 2021/12/01 18:32 da pietro