I occasionally receive inquiries from high school students and others who are just beginning their study of economics and want to know how to get started on economic research. My standard advice has four recommendations:
- Read a good introduction to economic reasoning for non-specialists. The best one I have found is my colleague Charlie Wheelan’s book, Naked Economics.
- Build a foundation in three areas -- principles of economics, calculus, and probability/statistics. For those without access to the relevant AP courses, Khan Academy is a good substitute. Take a look at microeconomics, macroeconomics, calculus, and statistics.
- Acquire some proficiency in computer programming. It seems that most students are learning the basics in Python. There are plenty of online resources to pick that up. (And for advanced students, see QuantEcon by Thomas Sargent and John Stachurski.) Once you have the basics, you will want to switch to a language that is meant for data handling and statistical analysis. I learned on Stata (Version 0.92!) and still use it, but many people are now learning on R, which is freely available. Here's the place to get started.
- In some respects, those are the easy recommendations. They build your analytical and computational toolkit. That will answer some of the “what” and the “how” of economic research. But the most important question is the “why.” Good research is based on an interesting question. What questions interest you? What assertion of fact or causality have you heard in public discussions about which you are skeptical or for which you require evidence? That’s the genesis of a good research project. So read widely about the economy and society. As I discuss in this inaugural episode of Big Green Economics, economics gets better when mixed with other disciplines.