"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein
The principal job of Corporate Economists is to provide assessment and outlook on business and economy with reasonable precision. Most of the questions he faces over time are not very different.
But a “Trust me” approach just does not work. Because there can be 10 different Economists with more than 10 different views freely available across media or research reports. For a reader, one Economist looks like the other.
Then what keeps a Corporate Economist on job. I think it’s his ability to establish credibility among his customers (management/decision makers/strategy makers) keep him demanding. Establishing credibility is the most challenging task. It needs trying and persuading with proper reasoning, provide real-world evidence, give astute clarification and deliver a simplified version of complex economics that drives the business environment.
Developing such persuading power needs a lot of hard work like continuous reading of thematic research reports and media commentaries, awareness of the latest developments in the economy, identify the right set of domain experts and discuss things with them, etc.
Along with these, regular reading of academic books is imperative. Moreover, economic research is a cross-disciplinary profession. It needs appropriate knowledge in economics, sufficient forecasting capability and a considerable level of skill in the coding programming language to run a statistical program like R. But it is not easy to make out adequate time to read a wide range of academic books while working in the non-academic workplace. Hence, I recommend a brief list of selected books (given below). For experienced persons, these books will help to rehearse acquired knowledge. And for fresher, these books will build new skill-set required in dealing with real-world data to solve real-world problems. The books can be downloaded in pdf format.
The principal job of Corporate Economists is to provide assessment and outlook on business and economy with reasonable precision. Most of the questions he faces over time are not very different.
But a “Trust me” approach just does not work. Because there can be 10 different Economists with more than 10 different views freely available across media or research reports. For a reader, one Economist looks like the other.
Then what keeps a Corporate Economist on job. I think it’s his ability to establish credibility among his customers (management/decision makers/strategy makers) keep him demanding. Establishing credibility is the most challenging task. It needs trying and persuading with proper reasoning, provide real-world evidence, give astute clarification and deliver a simplified version of complex economics that drives the business environment.
Developing such persuading power needs a lot of hard work like continuous reading of thematic research reports and media commentaries, awareness of the latest developments in the economy, identify the right set of domain experts and discuss things with them, etc.
Along with these, regular reading of academic books is imperative. Moreover, economic research is a cross-disciplinary profession. It needs appropriate knowledge in economics, sufficient forecasting capability and a considerable level of skill in the coding programming language to run a statistical program like R. But it is not easy to make out adequate time to read a wide range of academic books while working in the non-academic workplace. Hence, I recommend a brief list of selected books (given below). For experienced persons, these books will help to rehearse acquired knowledge. And for fresher, these books will build new skill-set required in dealing with real-world data to solve real-world problems. The books can be downloaded in pdf format.
Economics
Macroeconomics: Understanding the Wealth of Nations - David MilesFinancial Programming and Policies - IMF
Statistics
Foundations for data analysis
Econometrics
Econometrics by Example - Gujarati
Applied Econometric Time Series: Walter Enders
Timeseries Analysis: With Application in R: Cryer & Chang
Forecasting
Forecasting: Principles and Practice (With R )- Hyndman
Machine Learning
An introduction to statistical learning: With Application in R - Robert Tibshirani
Data Science
Data Science and Predictive Algorithms with R