Resources for Research in Economics, Finance and Business
The Library at Bard offers many sources of information for research in the fields of economics, finance and business. There are also many sources available for free on the Internet … from other universities … from government … and from non-governmental organizations and institutions.
Jump to the sources you need:
For additional help, or if you have corrections or suggestions about the resources on these pages, please contact:
Bill Walker
Librarian
The Levy Economics Institute at Bard College
845 758-7729
wwalker@levy.org
The American Economic Association's electronic database, this is the world's foremost source of references to economic literature. Source material in this database includes journal articles, essays, research papers, books, dissertations, book reviews, and working papers. The database contains more than 825,00 records covering 1969 to the present. The subjects covered within EconLit include accounting, consumer economics, monetary policy, labor, marketing, demographics, modeling, economic theory, planning, and much more. Contains links to full text. This is the first place to look for published, refereed articles. While EconLit does have working papers, you should check the actual working paper sites, (listed below in their own section), for far more comprehensive coverage.
Provides full text for more than 3,460 scholarly publications covering academic areas of study including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies. This database is updated on a daily basis. While this is clearly not an economics-oriented database, it cannot be ignored when doing thorough research.
By covering almost 3000 full scholarly journals and business periodicals in the areas of management, economics, accounting, international business, etc., BSP is one of the most important databases for business, finance and economics. BSP also offers profiles of the world's 10,000 largest companies, reports for over two thousand industry sectors, and hundreds of risk and economics reports for countries around the world.
Social Sciences Abstracts contains indexing for more than 500 publications covering a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as addiction studies, anthropology, corrections, economics, gender studies, gerontology, minority studies, political sciences, psychology, sociology. Indexing coverage dates back to 1983, and abstracts date back to 1994.
This is a journal archive, (title list here), mostly published by academic and scholarly presses, many of which cover economics. JSTOR should be checked for articles that would have been published before 1969, (when EconLit’s coverage begins), or simply for journal articles that are several years old.
CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online)*
A comprehensive source for theory and research in international affairs. It publishes a wide range of scholarship from 1991 on that includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, and proceedings from conferences. Each section of CIAO is updated with new material on a regular schedule. Working papers are augmented every month, as are conference proceedings, policy briefs and economic indicators.
PAIS INTERNATIONAL(Public Affairs Information Service)*
Contains references to more than 553,300 journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, gray literature, research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, microfiche, Internet material, and more dating back to 1972. Click on the Specific Databases link to add the PAIS Archive, which offers coverage from 1915-1976, to your search.
With well over 100 journals in full-text, Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and many others, searchable through Project Muse itself, or through the appropriate subject indexes.
Here’s a listing of the home pages of many of the economics journals being published. In some cases the publisher makes available the most recent issue even if we do not subscribe. In others, there are abstracts of articles or tables of contents – if you see an article you need, and if we do not subscribe to that particular journal, we will get it via an inter-library loan.
Journal of Economic Literature classification system.
Brings together a wide variety of global business information, enabling users to efficiently research business case studies, competitive intelligence, and career and investment opportunities. Includes: Business Plans Handbook, volumes 5-10 (a collection of actual business plans compiled by entrepreneurs seeking funding), Gale Encyclopedia of e-Commerce and the Encyclopedia of Small Businesses, 2nd edition.
2,804 full scholarly journals and business periodicals covering management, economics, accounting, international business, etc. Contains full text from top management and marketing journals.
Business Source Premier’s one-stop source for information on companies, industries, market research…even reports on the history, economy and politics of countries around the world.
Sources cover business, political, economic and other international news events. Contains the most recent 30 days of information. Several hundred articles are added each day.
Disclosure Corporate Snapshots*
Contains information about all public company filings including annual reports, company summary information, and shareholder reports from 1986 to the present. Includes information from public documents maintained by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Offers daily updates of stock trading reports. Displays full-text of documents.
Provides full-text access to a wide range of news, business, legal, and reference information.
US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns
Provides economic data nationwide on a county basis. This is particularly good for looking at and analyzing business in small areas. The information is available for the past seven years, so you can look at an area over that time period and study the changes.
This is the XE.com Universal Currency Converter ®, a popular currency tool. You can perform interactive foreign exchange (FX, or forex) rate calculations, using live, up-to-the-minute currency rates.
This site contains a great deal of educational information including the EDGAR database of disclosure documents that public companies are required to file with the SEC. See also the SEC Info (free registration) for more data.
While this is a fee-based service, there is a great deal of free information on individual companies and industries available as well.
Owned by Dow Jones, (who also own Barrons and Factiva, and used to own the Wall Street Journal), this is a financial information website that provides business news, analysis and stock market data. . It offers personal finance news and advice, tools for investors, and access to industry research, along with links to newsletters, message boards – even a free online stock trading game.
Website for the international market-data provider and new service. It provides current prices, currency data, market research and analytics. There are separate pages for news, markets, industries, stocks, options, ETFs, bonds, etc.
Breaking news, world news, business news, multimedia…and with a college or university email account, the online version is completely free.
A major international newspaper that has substantial coverage of business and world news.
Although full coverage is available only to subscribers, there is a substantial amount of information available online for free.
Provides full-text access to a wide range of news, business, legal, and reference information.
Since 1843, The Economist has been delivering reporting, commentary, and analysis on world politics, finance, and business trends. Also covers science and technology, literature and the arts.
EH.Net operates the Economic History Services web site and several electronic mailing lists to provide resources and promote communication among scholars in economic history and related fields. EH.Net is supported by the Economic History Association and other affiliated organizations: the Business History Conference, the Cliometric Society, the Economic History Society, and the History of Economics Society.
Covers the US Census from 1780-1960. Coverage down to the county level includes population, education and literacy, economy/manufacturing/employment, agriculture, ethnicity/race/place of birth, and slave population. There is also an “Map It” feature that allows you to view the data in the form of an interactive map.
Archives of The New York Times, 1851-2003, in living page image — exactly as they appeared to the original readers decades ago.
An online collection of annual reports from some 43 companies dating from 1834–1968. In PDF format, you can see the actual reports.
This lists a number of sites and books that attempt to address the question of how much an amount of money would be worth today, while also providing other ways to determine well being.
For Statistics, please see the Bard Library page titled "Statistics."
EconPapers use the RePEc bibliographic and author data, providing access to the largest collection of online Economics working papers and journal articles. The majority of the full text files are freely available, but some (typically journal articles) require that we subscribe to the service providing the full text file.
The staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS), the International Finance Discussion Paper (IFDP) series, and the Occasional Staff Studies,(OSS) are research materials distributed to stimulate discussion and critical comment. (The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Board of Governors.)
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986 through the support of Bard College trustee Leon Levy, is a non-profit, nonpartisan, public-policy organization.
The National Bureau of Economic Research is one of the nation's leading nonprofit economic research organizations. Easy links allow you to search the abstracts, full text or bibliographies. You can also browse by JEL class, by date of release, by NBER program, or even by popularity.
The Social Science Research Network consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 158,400 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 125,700 downloadable full-text documents in PDF format. The SSRN’s stated objective is to “provide worldwide distribution of research to authors and their readers and to facilitate communication among them at the lowest possible cost.” Authors can upload papers without charge, and any paper an author uploads to SSRN is downloadable for free, worldwide.
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. These are searchable by date, topic, type/series, language, and country/region.
Reviews of the economic, political and social conditions of countries around the world.
The listing is from the Bank for International Settlements, (an international organization that provides banking services exclusively to Central Banks for the purposes of monetary and and financial stability), and it is a listing of links to the Central Banks or their equivalents from around the world.
No, not the Culinary Institute of America, that CIA. You can download this or search it from the web site. Each country, (or separate political subdivision – Dhekelia, anyone?), is covered in detail, with historical background, geographical, political, economic, military and social statistics.
The Internet Center for Corruption Research provides you with the TI-Corruption Perceptions Index, a comparative assessment of countries' integrity performance, alongside with related academic research on corruption.
Thinking of doing business in Uzbekistan or Macedonia? Snapshots provide a concise digest of facts, figures, economic indicators and tax rates for nearly 100 significant trading jurisdictions. International Tax and Business Guides are extended reports on the regulatory, tax and human resources environment for more than 50 major economies worldwide. Each jurisdiction page contains HTML and PDF versions of the publications covering the location in question.
More information than you probably even knew existed about the G8. The site is brought to you by the University of Toronto Library and the G8 Research Group at the University of Toronto.
International Statistical Agencies -- A Listing
It's from the US Census Bureau, but it's international: a comprehensive listing of the statistical agencies from each nation (or autonomous or semi-autonomous region) around the world. The only drawback is that not all of the sites are in English.
Library of Congress Country Studies
This Web site contains the online versions of books previously published (1988-98) in hard copy by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Army. Because the original intent of the series' sponsor was to focus primarily on lesser-known areas of the world or regions in which U.S. forces might be deployed, the series is not all-inclusive. At present, 101 countries and regions are covered. The date of information for each country appears on the title page of each country and at the end of each section of text. This Web site also contains brief, more up-to-date Country Profiles on select countries.
Library of Congress Portals to the World
Links to various Internet Resources from around the world about the different nations. Uneven coverage, but frequently fascinating.
Living Standards Measurement Studies of the World Bank
Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) household surveys have become an important tool in measuring and understanding poverty in developing countries. The Development Economics Research Group (DECRG) of the World Bank, formerly the Policy Research Department, maintains this website to make available to researchers around the world the data sets and methodological lessons from these surveys.
For more than 40 years, the OECD has been one of the world's largest sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data. As well as collecting data, the OECD monitors trends, analyses and forecasts economic developments and researches social changes or evolving patterns in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and more.
United Nations, National Accounts Statistics
This National Accounts Statistics database contains a complete and consistent set of time series from 1970 onwards of main national accounts aggregates for all UN Members States and all other countries and areas in the world.
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The World Bank
The World Bank has a number of sites -- all free and full of useful information. Here is a quick listing of some of the most useful:
GenderStats -- Part of the World Bank's Gender Net...contains info on education, health, economic development, labor, political participation and more.
Governance Research Indicators -- this is the portal to updated aggregate governance research indicators for 212 countries for 1996–2006, for the following dimensions of governance: accountability, political stability & absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption.
Country @ a Glance -- a fast look, (PDF), at every country in the world and its social and economic development over the past 30-years.
Education Statistics -- draws on data from UNESCO, OECD and other international agencies.
HNPStats -- health, nutrition and population statistics.
World Health Organization, Statistical Information System
WHOSIS presents the most recent and comprehensive health data on all of the 193 WHO Member States. The data, selected on the basis of quality and availability, relevance to global health, and comparability across member nations, cover over 50 core health indicators, which are organized into six major areas: mortality and burden of disease, health service coverage, risk factors, health system inputs, differentials in health outcome and coverage, as well as basic socio-demographic statistics.
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This guide is sponsored by the American Economic Association. It lists more than 2,000 resources in 97 sections and sub-sections available on the Internet of interest to academic and practicing economists, and those interested in economics. Almost all resources are also described.
Wonderful gateway site to many online resources, gathered and maintained by the “Oswald Distinguished Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Kansas.”
Inomics is an Internet service directed to the needs of economists. It has job openings for economists, conference announcements, a human-edited directory as well as a database of research papers in economics. The EconDir has a list of particularly helpful links.
Intute is a free online British service providing you with access to Web resources for education and research. The service was created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write the descriptions of the resources. Very good for EU research in general and British in particular.
From FindLaw, a legal website owned by the West Group, a Thomson company, this has an easy-to-use page of links to sites that cover the overlap of legal and economic issues.
McMaster Universtiy Archive of the History of Economic Thought
A repository of texts that are significant in, well, you guessed it, the history of economic thought. The site is a work in progress with new texts being added -- there are hundreds of authors there.
New School's History of Economic Thought
Hosted by the Economics Department of the New School for Social Research, this site contains an alphabetical listing of economists along with their major works and references, a listing of the major economic schools and their proponents, Surveys and Essays, and links to further sites.
A dictionary of economics BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB61 .B554 1997
An encyclopedia of Keynesian economics BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB99.7 .E528 1997
An eponymous dictionary of economics : a guide to laws and theorems named after economists BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB61 .E66 2004
Dictionary of economics BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB61.R92 1991
Dictionary of finance and investment terms BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HG.151 D69 1987
Dictionary of statistics & methodology : a nontechnical guide for the social sciences BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HA17.V64 2005
Encyclopedia of American economic history : studies of the principal movements and ideas BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HC103 .E52
Encyclopedia of Law and Economics
Financial lexicon : a compendium of financial definitions, acronyms, and colloquialisms BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HG.151 B2697 2005
Historical statistics of the United States : earliest times to the present BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HA202 .H57 2006
International encyclopedia of economic sociology BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HM35.I565 2006
Routledge encyclopedia of international political economy BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HF1359 .R68 2001
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
The Economist guide to economic indicators : making sense of economics BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HA29.E28 1997
The McGraw-Hill dictionary of modern economics : a handbook of terms and organizations BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB61.M3 1983
The McGraw-Hill encyclopedia of economics BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB61.E55 1994
The New Palgrave : a dictionary of economics BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB61.N49 1987
The new Palgrave dictionary of economics and the law BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION K487.E3 N48 1998
The Routledge critical dictionary of global economics BARD REFERENCE COLLECTION HB61.R68 1999
North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS)
The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) has replaced the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. The U.S., Canada, and Mexico, to provide new comparability in statistics about business activity across North America, developed it jointly.
The Congressional Directory is the official directory of the U.S. Congress, prepared by the Joint Committee on Printing (JCP). Published since 1888, the Congressional Directory presents short biographies of each member of the Senate and House, listed by state or district, and additional data, such as committee memberships, terms of service, administrative assistants and/or secretaries, and room and telephone numbers.
Catalog of US Government Publications
This is the finding tool for federal publications. It includes descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those that are available online. Users can search by authoring agency, title, subject, and general key word, or click on "Advanced Search" for more options.
[1] An asterisk (*) after the name of the database indicates that you need to be signed into the Bard Library Site for access.