🎓 Teaching & Learning

Tacit skills essentials: 

Before starting to write your thesis or dissertation, read John Cochrane's writing tips for PhD Students (also useful for Masters students). For some excellent writing tips read this (witty) executive summary titled Economical Writing by D. McCloskey (preferably the short book). Details of how to give an academic talk can be found on Jonathan Shewchuk's website. Lasse Heje Pedersen has a useful presentation on "How to succeed in academia".  For a list of more useful resources see Steve Pischke's Resources for Economics PhD Students (aka "How to do research and write about it?").

Coding skills: 

Best writing software (for academics): see this post from my good friend Dawie van Lill (I consider him to be one of those freakish polymath humans).

Getting started with learning to code in R: How to learn R (the programming language) by Aiden Horn; R for Data Science (2e) was written by Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund.

I mainly use Dynare in MATLAB, with my primary research being in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Both Dynare and MATLAB have excellent documentation and online examples. See also the Macroeconomic Model Data Base (MMB) for existing Dynare code for over 150 structural macroeconomic models. Another great MATLAB toolbox for solving and estimating nonlinear Regime-Switching DSGE models is RISE from Junior Maih. A free alternative to MATLAB is Octave. 

Julia is a free and open-source programming language. Alternative Julia packages in development to run DSGE models include Dynare.jl, DSGE.jl and MacroModelling.jl.

Open data sources:

EconData by Codera maintains a vast repository of South African public data. Codera provides an open application interface (API) and packages for R and Python, as well as an Excel plugin, to enable fully automatable workflows. There are easy-to-follow tutorials for using the platform and automating models and charts. I recommend that you follow them on social media platforms (LinkedIn and X) for their very interesting daily "data snapshots" (both SA and international).

Courses lectured:

Current: Advanced Macroeconomics (Masters, UCT);  Introduction to Advanced Macroeconomics (Honours, UCT); Financial Economics (Honours & MPhil, UCT); International Finance (Honours & Masters, SU); Macroeconomics (Second-year, UCT) | Previous: Mathematical Economics (Honours, SU); Monetary Economics (Honours & Masters, SU); Issues in Banking & Finance (MPhil, USB); Dynamic Economic Theory (Masters, SU); Macroeconomics (First-year, SU); International Finance (Second-year, SU); Macroeconomics (Honours, UCT); International Finance (Honours, UWC & UCT)

Capacity building:

In the pipeline: Macroeconometrics workshop for policymakers and graduate students (with D. van Lill); The National Treasury DSGE model - "Government debt and interest rates" and "Fiscal sustainability and optimal policy" (see recorded presentation)

Other resources:

Here are some of my favourite podcasts for macro, finance, monetary, and trade (and more)...

These podcasts are typically 45min or longer:

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/tags/macro-musings (predominately macro, monetary, finance)

https://www.econtalk.org/ (wide-ranging; just search for topics you're interested in)

https://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts (several, but I like "Bloomberg surveillance" and "masters in business" and "Stephanomics")

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/risky-business-with-nate-silver-maria-konnikova (everything from politics to poker to personal decisions)

Shorter podcasts (10-25min):

https://www.tradetalkspodcast.com/ 

https://www.ft.com/podcasts (some not active anymore, like "hard currency" and "alpha chat", but still very interesting archive.)

https://www.economist.com/podcasts (money talks)

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/ (planet money --- accessible for general audience and actually more "general" than "money-focused")

There are many others available, but the above are good starts. All podcasts are available on iTunes and should also be available on other platforms like SoundCloud.

The best economics podcasts in 2018 — Tim Harford