
Quantitative Economics with Julia [pdf] - bernatfp
http://quant-econ.net/_static/pdfs/jl-quant-econ.pdf
======
ViralBShah
This is a really well written book, and really makes the subject matter come
alive with programming. Of course, I personally also love the fact that they
have a Julia version.

For those who may not know, Prof. Sargent was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Economics in 2011. Also, kudos to the Sloan Foundation for funding this work.
I wish there were more high quality textbooks of this kind.

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zissou
I thinks it's great that 2 well known economists with household names in the
academy have taken to marketing programming to economists. I just wish they
would have called this venture something other than Quantitative Economics
when they launched it last year. It's not that it's the wrong name, it is just
misleading.

A better name would have been Quantitative Macroeconomics, because that is
clearly the target market. Yes, I know there are some generic topics in there
like Linear Algebra that both micro and macro economists could use, but it's
not like there is a lack of numpy and scipy examples on the Internet.

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imanuelcostigan
Job search is not macro..it's micro

~~~
zissou
What are you talking about? Did you even look at their section on job search?
It is most definitely a macro application.

Disregarding the fact that job search is a subtopic of unemployment, one of
the main concepts in macro, you'll notice their model parameters are human
capital, investment, and wage. The only quasi micro flavor of that model is
search effort as these variables will almost always be in equilibrium based on
some kind of an optimal stopping rule. Whether that rule has to do with
finding a new job or discovering information about, say, the prices in the
market dictates whether it would be a micro or macro use case. Again, if you
actually looked at the model, their optimal stopping rule is when the person
finds another job. And once again, the idea of jobs are the main ingredient in
the concept of unemployment.... a macro topic. Not to mention, whether or not
I'm _searching for a job_ dictates whether I'm factored into the unemployment
rate or not.

So..... yeah, job search is definitely not micro.

~~~
imanuelcostigan
From Wikipedia

In microeconomics, search theory studies buyers or sellers who cannot
instantly find a trading partner, and must therefore search for a partner
prior to transacting.

Search theory has been influential in many areas of economics. It has been
applied in labor economics to analyze frictional unemployment resulting from
job hunting by workers.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_theory)

~~~
Gimpei
Yeah, this is why wikipedia is not always the most trustworthy source.

I definitely studied these types of models in macro classes from Pissarides,
one of the pioneers in the job search field. I think he'd be amused to learn
that he had become a microeconomist.

Also, if you look at the example, it is taken directly out of Sargent's
textbook: Recursive Macroeconomic Theory.

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arthurcolle
I didn't imagine Julia had the maturity to have a book like this written about
it. _Dives in_

Does anyone have anything to say about Julia's benefits vs R or even Python
(SciPy, Numpy, etc)? I'm in a machine learning course this semester and we
have a choice of language and I'm wondering if its worth it to try and use
Julia rather than Python since its so hip. (Just kidding about it being hip,
but it would be interesting to learn something with increasing developer
support).

~~~
idunning
In my opinion, as a contributor to Julia and someone who teaches machine
learning with R - start with R. Things will "just work" for the most part and
you won't have to worry about whether your packages will work while you are
learning ML. I recommend using the "caret" package in particular: it puts all
the ML packages behind a nice common interface and has goodies like
crossvalidation and train/test splits built in.

Python with Scikit-learn could be a good choice too from everything I hear
(possibly even better, by some accounts).

To be clear, Julia is more than capable of doing ML, but I'd say that
interface-wise its not quite there yet. Most of the pieces are there,
everything from DataFrames to wrappers for GLMNet to random forests, and even
the deep learning library Mocha.jl (check it out, its fantastic!). If you were
to implement a new ML algorithm, I'd want to be doing it in Julia - it'll
perform great without having to get in a multi-language scenario (like R+Rcpp
or Python+???[numba?]).

~~~
shoyer
Cython is usually the most best option for maintainable, high performance
numerics with Python these days -- it's the option of choice for scikit-learn
and pandas. Numba can be easier in some cases (no manual typing necessary) but
is still pretty limited in some ways.

~~~
Lofkin
Is numba poised to overcome these limitations at some point?

------
rattray
Online version at [http://quant-econ.net/jl/index.html](http://quant-
econ.net/jl/index.html)

~~~
3JPLW
I'm not sure why the PDF was chosen as the submission. The PDF says:

> Note: You are currently viewing an automatically generated PDF version of
> our on- line lectures, which are located at [http://quant-
> econ.net](http://quant-econ.net) Please visit the website for more
> information on the aims and scope of the lectures and the two language
> options (Julia or Python). This PDF is generated from a set of source files
> that are orientated towards the website and to HTML output. As a result, the
> presentation quality can be less consistent than the website.

And, indeed, the website is _very_ nice. It'd be nice to change the link to
the website.

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azth
The Julia PDF file is 396 pages long, while the Python one is 549 pages long.
Hmm :)

~~~
tadlan
What are you implying?

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byEngineer
Only Nobel price winning economists think that inflation works. Krugman and
now this dude. Not to mention stuff like giving away nobel prices for
"encouragement".

I feel really sorry for physics, chemistry and other researchers who must be
really worth something to get this prize just to have a moron believing that
printing money solves economic issues sitting next to him.

