GAPMINDER

Gapminder Foundation is a non-profit venture registered in Stockholm, Sweden, that promotes sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.
The Foundation developed the Trendalyzer software, which was acquired by Google in March 2007. The current version of Trendalyzer is Gapminder World, a web-service displaying time series of development statistics for all countries and many sub-national regions. Gapminder world uses "Google Motion Charts" to power its graphics. The Gapminder Foundation has also produced a number of other projects, including:

• World Income Distribution, an interactive display of statistics on household income distribution for Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria, Pakistan and USA and the World as a whole in each year from 1970 to 1998.
• Dollar Street, an interactive display of the world as a street. The street number is the daily income per person in the family. All people of the world live on Dollar Street. The poorest live in the left end and the richest in the extreme right end. All other people live in between on a continuous scale of daily incomes.
• Human Development Trends 2003, a linear thematic Flash presentation is developed with United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for the release of the Human Development Report 200.
• World Health Chart 2001, a display of 50 to 100 years of health development for all countries of the World with time series for 35 indicators provided by the World Health Organization.
  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
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Federal Reserve Economic Data

What is FRED? Short for Federal Reserve Economic Data, FRED is an online database consisting of more than 72,000 economic data time series from 54 national, international, public, and private sources. FRED, created and maintained by Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, goes far beyond simply providing data: It combines data with a powerful mix of tools that help the user understand, interact with, display, and disseminate the data. In essence, FRED helps users tell their data stories. The purpose of this article is to guide the potential (or current) FRED user through the various aspects and tools of the database.

As mentioned above, as of the time of this writing, FRED contains more than 55,000 data series from over 40 sources. These are not static figures. The Research Department has a firm commitment to the growth of the database. Since its inception, FRED has contained many of the more popular figures reported by the Board of Governors, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Census—among others. Through time, FRED has expanded its collection to include many more international, national, and regional data series. More recently, it has become clear that data surrounding other topics and geographies must also be included if FRED is to best serve its users. Naturally, care must be taken to add data in a thorough and prudent manner; nevertheless, the data content will continue to grow and evolve.

Certain data, as it travels through time, is subject to revision. Anyone who follows GDP long enough will be familiar with the BEA revising (up or down) their quarterly released figure. The FRED database always contains and displays the most recent revision—or vintage—of the data available. But FRED’s real-time relative, the aforementioned ALFRED (ArchivaL Federal Reserve Economic Database), captures all of these individual revisions to a data series. This means that collectively, FRED and ALFRED data can literally be used as a data time machine, allowing users access to the precise data that their predecessors used. Researchers often attempt to replicate results of previous academic papers or use data to “train” economic models; in these instances, the relevance of these FRED tools becomes clear.

Access to Federal Reserve Economic Data

IHS Global Insight

IHS is a global information company with world-class experts in the pivotal areas shaping today’s business landscape: energy, economics, geopolitical risk, sustainability and supply chain management. It employs more than 6,000 people in more than 31 countries around the world. 

IHS Global Insight Country Intelligence provides constantly updated analysis of the business conditions, economic prospects and risks in over 200 countries.

It assess new market opportunities for foreign direct or portfolio investment, trade in securities and currencies, or monitor the risk landscape in country, regional, or global markets.

IHS Global Insight Industry Intelligence covers the world's industries with unparalleled
expertise, market perspectives, and global analysis. In addition to our thorough global industry analysis and detailed U.S. Industry coverage, IHS Global Insight has expertise in all major industries. 

Butterfly Effect-Video 

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TED

TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, under the slogan "ideas worth spreading".

TED was founded in 1984 as a one-off event. The annual conference began in 1990, in Monterey, California. TED's early emphasis was technology and design, consistent with its origins in the Silicon Valley.

The TED main conference is held annually in Long Beach, and its companion TEDActive is held in Palm Springs. Both conferences will move from Long Beach and Palm Springs to Vancouver and Whistler, respectively, in 2014.


TED events are also held throughout the U.S. and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming of the talks. They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling.The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can.

TED's current curator is the British former computer journalist and magazine publisher Chris Anderson.

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WOLFRAM ALPHA

Wolfram Alpha (also styled WolframAlpha and Wolfram|Alpha), is a computational knowledge engine or answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced "curated data", rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.


Wolfram Alpha, which was released on May 15, 2009, is based on Wolfram's earlier flagship product Mathematica, a computational platform or toolkit that encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities.

 

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CONNECT 4

CONNECT 4 provides information used to track and analyse such as takeovers and mergers, capital raisings, auditing and accounting practices, and corporate governance compliance.


Connect 4, owned by Thomson Reuters, specialises in providing information on companies which are listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Founded in 1992, our Analysts and Technical staff are dedicated to providing comprehensive, innovative, unique and leading edge products to assist the market place in understanding the activities of publicly listed companies in Australia.

Our products are used in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. We have recently formed a marketing relationship with europrospectus.com in The United Kingdom for the purpose of providing Australian company information to the UK and Europe.

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EMERALD INSIGHT

Emerald is a global publisher providing you with the highest quality, peer-reviewed research. With over 40 years’ experience, Emerald manages a portfolio of over 290 journals.
 

Featuring journals that are indexed by Thomson Reuters (ISI) and Scopus, content is selected for original contribution to the subject field, as well as practical relevance to policy making and future inquiry. 

The Emerald Books portfolio now includes well over 2,000 titles, with a further 160 new titles due to publish this year. Our respected international author and editor base, genuine global appeal and usage of both print and ebooks have contributed to Emerald’s growing reputation as a major scholarly book publisher.

Our books address and explore some of the world’s most topical issues, from the global financial crisis to social media, from sustainability to virtual learning, ensuring our research continues to have impact and relevancy for students, researchers, practitioners, businesses, government departments and institutions worldwide.
 


Emerald Emerging Markets Case Studies (EEMCS) is an online collection of peer-reviewed case studies focusing on business decision making and management development throughout key global emerging markets.
Cases are written by case writers working in or closely with developing economies, offering local perspectives with global appeal.
 
EEMCS was developed in 2011 in response to increasing demand from business educators and practitioners for quality-controlled teaching cases focusing on global emerging markets. The collection receives regular content updates throughout the year and all cases benefit from a supportive peer-review process to ensure the highest quality content.

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MetaCrawler

MetaCrawler utilizes metasearch technology to compile results from many of the Web’s major search properties, delivering more relevant and comprehensive results every time you search. The search results you receive include the top commercial (sponsored advertising) and non-commercial (algorithmic) results from the most popular search engines on the Web.

By accessing multiple search engines for each query, MetaCrawler.com provides you with a richer and more relevant spectrum of results than you would from using any single search engine.

MetaCrawler.com web search is designed to identify the intent of a user’s search and results will generally be listed in separate sections and in order of relevance, with sponsored results in the “ads” or “Sponsored Results” section and organic results in the “Web Results” section. For example, if you are searching for information about the prices of digital cameras and enter the term “digital camera prices,” you will generally receive more sponsored results and commercial Web pages containing information on the prices at which businesses are offering cameras as well as organic results. If, on the other hand, you are searching for academic or general research purposes and enter the term “digital camera technology,” the results will be weighted more toward articles, information and other non-commercial results about the technology behind digital cameras.

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JSTOR

JSTOR is a shared digital library created in 1995 to help university and college libraries to free space on their shelves, save costs, and provide greater levels of access to more content than ever before.

More generally, by digitizing content to high standards and supporting its long-term preservation, we also aim to help libraries and publishers of scholarly content transition their collections and publishing activities from print to digital operations.

JSTOR currently includes more than 1,700 academic journals, dating back to the first volume ever published, along with thousands of monographs and other materials relevant for education.

It is useful to find specific books. i for example searched for a book typied in English, about finance. i selected one called “Investment under Uncertainty” .

 

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The American Finance Association

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of financial research. It is one of the most widely cited academic journals on finance and one of the most widely cited journals in all of economics as well. Each issue of the journal reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, government and financial institutions around the world. Published six times a year, the journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

The AFA was planned at a meeting in December 1939 in Philadelphia. The first journal of the American Finance Association was called American Finance and was published in 1942. The journal was renamed The Journal of Finance and became a regular serial journal in August 1946.

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EUROSTAT

Eurostat is the statistical office of the European Union situated in Luxembourg. Its task is to provide the European Union with high quality statistics at European level that enable comparisons between countries and regions.

The Eurostat statistical work is structured into Themes and Sub-themes: EU policy indicators, General and regional statistics, Economy and finance, Poupulation and social conditions, Industry, trade and services, Agriculture and fisheries, External trade, Transport, Environment and energy, and Science and technology.

The statistics are placed on the Eurostat Internet ay 11:00 in the morning. They are hierarchically ordered in a navigation tree. Tables are distinguised from multi-dimensional datasets from which the statistics are extracted via an interactive tool. In addition, some printed publications on the press are available either in electronic form for free on the internet or in printed form via the EU Bookshop.

Finding economic data in Eurostat-Video

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BLOOMBERG

Bloomberg is a professional on-line database that provides real-time and historic trading data, analytics and research, and news for global financial markets. The markets include but are not limited to government securities, corporate securities, mortgage, money-market, indices, currency, commodities and equities.

Bloomberg is used to monitor the news on a company, industry, economy. It finds stock prices and price information on commodities and currencies, as well as members of S&P 500 or other equity indices. Bloomberg is also used to build and maintain stock/bond portfolios.

Bloomberg® Data License gives you enterprise-wide access to one of the world's largest, most accurate databases. Intra-day and end-of-day market and reference data is available for all asset classes and includes corporate actions, credit and issuer data on more than six million securities traded around the world. The world's leading investment banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge fund managers, custodians and fund administrators rely on our data to feed their critical front-, middle- and back-office applications, and you can too.

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MetaLib

MetaLib is an information portal to library collections. It enables institutions to provide their patrons with access to information resources such as catalogs, reference databases, citation databases, subject gateways, and e-journals. MetaLib offers MetaSearch™ capabilities across diverse resources- be they print or electronic, on-site or remote- and offers library patrons a variety of personalized services.

The MetaSearch technology enables users to conduct federated searching- also known as simultaneous searching, cross-database searching, parallel searching, broadcast searching, and integrated searching. In this type of search process, a user submits a query to numerous information resources. They can be heterogeneous in many respects- for example, their location, the format of the information that they offer, the technologies on which they draw, and the types of materials that they contain. The user's query is broadcast to each resource, and results are returned to the user.

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GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries. It indexes "full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected Web pages that are deemed to be 'scholarly. Because many of Google Scholar's search results link to commercial journal articles, most people will be able to access only an abstract and the citation details of an article, and have to pay a fee to access the entire article. The most relevant results for the searched keywords will be listed first, in order of the author's ranking, the number of references that are linked to it and their relevance to other scholarly literature, and the ranking of the publication that the journal appears in.

Using its "group of" feature, it shows the available links to journal articles. In the 2005 version, this feature provided a link to both subscription-access versions of an article and to free full-text versions of articles; for most of 2006, it provided links to only the publishers' versions. Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, but still does not cover those posted on individual faculty web pages; access to such self-archived non-subscription versions is now provided by a link to Google, where one can find such open access articles.

Through its "cited by" feature, Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed. It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in Scopus and Web of Knowledge. Through its "Related articles" feature, Google Scholar presents a list of closely related articles, ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also taking into account the relevance of each paper.

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HOOVERS

D&B is the world's leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses, enabling companies to Decide with Confidence for more than 170 years. Today, D&B's global commercial database contains more than 200 million business records. Enhanced by D&B's proprietary DUNSRight ™Quality Process, the D&B database provides our customers with unparalleled quality business information -- the foundation of our global solutions that customers rely on to make critical business decisions.

D&B provides solutions that meet a diverse set of global customer needs. Customers use D&B Risk Management Solutions™ to mitigate credit and supplier risk, increase cash flow and drive increased profitability; D&B Sales & Marketing Solutions™ to increase revenue from new and existing customers; and to convert prospects into clients faster by enabling business professionals to research companies, executives and industries.

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ABI/INFORM

The ABI/Inform database provides indexing, abstracting and full-text coverage of top business periodicals and news sources. 

ABI/Inform is comprised of three specialized databases which can be accessed individually or together: ABI/Inform Dateline, which includes hard-to-find local and regional business news coverage; ABI/Inform Global, providing access to nearly 1800 worldwide business periodicals; and ABI/Inform Trade and Industry, covering more than 750 business periodicals and newsletters with a trade or industry focus. 

This combination of products, covering different aspects of business information, covers scholarly research, businesses traditions and trends, corporate strategies, management techniques, and competitive and product information. 

Coverage begins with 1971 and is updated daily. ABI/Inform is produced by and made available through PROQUEST Information and Learning Company.

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International Monetary Fund

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international organization that was initiated in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference and formally created in 1945 by 29 member countries. The IMF's stated goal was to assist in the reconstruction of the world’s international payment system post-World War II.


The IMF publishes a range of time series data on IMF lending, exchange rates and other economic and financial indicators. Manuals, guides, and other material on statistical practices at the IMF, in member countries,and of the statistical community at large are available.

One of the most useful information resource of the website is the World Economic Outlook Database, which contains selected macroeconomic data series from the statistical appendix of the World Economic Outlook report, which presents the IMF staff's analysis and projections of economic developments at the global level, in major country groups and in many individual countries. The WEO is released in April and September/October each year.

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Scopus

Scopus, officially named SciVerse Scopus, is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles.
It covers nearly 20,500 titles from over 5,000 international publishers, of which 19,500 are peer-reviewed journals, books series, and conference proceedings that feature scientific, medical, technical and social science topics.

Scopus does not use a controlled vocabulary, like MeSH to search. This database also contains over 23 million patent records and Scrius a
scientific web page search. Scopus provides users the option to access article reference citations and to perform cited reference searching.

It is owned by Elsevier and is available online by subscription.
Searches in Scopus incorporate searches of scientific web pages through Scirus, another Elsevier product, as well as patent databases.

Access to Scopus

RefWorks

RefWorks is an online research management, writing and collaboration tool, it is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies. 

Users’ reference databases are stored online, allowing them to be accessed and updated from any computer with an internet connection. Institutional licenses allow universities to subscribe to RefWorks on behalf of all their students, faculty and staff. Individual licenses are also available. The software enables linking from a user’s RefWorks account to electronic editions of journals to which the institution’s library subscribes.

A word processor integration utility called Write-N-Cite enables users to insert reference codes from their RefWorks accounts into Microsoft Word documents, which can then be formatted to produce in-text citations and reference lists in various styles.
RefWorks includes RefGrab-It, a utility designed to capture bibliographic information from websites. (we will be talking about RefGrab-It in our next post).

RefWorks was founded in 2001 and was marketed by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts from 2002 until being acquired by ProQuest in 2008.

Access to RefWorks 

Research Papers in Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 75 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data is then used in various services as described below. 

So far, over 1400 archives from 75 countries have contributed about 1.2 million research pieces from 1,500 journals and 3,300 working paper series. Over 30,000 authors have registered and 70,000 email subscriptions are served every week. See below on how you can be part of this initiative. 

Access to RePEc

OECD

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) is an organism created by the European Union in order to assist them while preparing market economy reforms. The OECD has different ways of sharing their data. They publish books, reports, statistics and working papers. The books published are the following and as they are updated at least annually and they contain the most recent and reliable information.

Among the different ways of reaching the OECD's information we can point out the better one for university students, the OECD iLibrary. It is the global knowledge base for OECD's data and analysis. It contains all books and papers published since 1998, as well as a wide collection of statistics, with data covering 80 countries since 1960s. Users can search and click directly to chapters, articles, books, tables, databases, etc. These content items are available in different formats and languages. As one of the most comprehensive online resources on the world economy, society, education and environment, OECD iLibrary is a powerful tool for people working at academic institutions, in the private sector and at a governmental or non-governmental organisations.

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Centre for Research in Security Prices

The Center for Research in Security Prices, often known by its acronym CRSP, is a research centre at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago.

It maintains the most comprehensive collection of security price, return, and volume data for the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ stock markets. Additional CRSP files provide stock indices, beta- and cap-based portfolios, treasury bond and risk-free rates, and mutual fund databases. 

It also provides CRSP/Compustat Merged Database, a database that simplifies matching COMPUSTAT financial data to the CRSP security price data.

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ZEPHYR

ZEPHYR is an information solution containing M&A, IPO and venture capital deals with links to detailed financial company information. ZEPHYR now contains information on over half a million transactions (August 2007). Up to 100,000 new deals are added per year. The database is also expanding to cover more historical American and Asian transactions. ZEPHYR has five years of global coverage and includes deals involving European or American companies going back to 1997. 

Various deal types are covered including: M&A activity, IPOs, joint ventures and private equity deals. There is no minimum deal value so you can analyse all deals in detail, irrespective of the transaction size. All deal information is translated into English. 

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Bankscope

Bankscope is a comprehensive, global database containing information on public and private banks. 

It includes information on 29,000 banks around the world. It combines data from the
main information provider, Fitch Ratings, and nine other sources, with software for searching and analysis.

Each bank report contains detailed consolidated and/or unconsolidated balance sheet and
income statement totalling up to 200 data items and 36 pre-calculated ratios per bank. The
data is provided in varying degrees of standardisation and detail so you can search and
analyze banks across borders. In addition to the existing ratios you can also create your own
that you can display in the reports and also use in your searches and analyses.

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Web of Knowledge

Web of Knowledge (formerly known as ISI Web of Knowledge) is an academic citation indexing and search service, which is combined with web linking and is provided by Thomson Reuters. Web of Knowledge covers the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. It provides bibliographic content and tools to access, analyze, and manage research information. Multiple databases can be searched simultaneously.

Web of Knowledge is described as a unifying research tool which enables the user to acquire, analyze, and disseminate database information in a timely manner. This is accomplished because of the creation of a common vocabulary for varied search terms and varied data. Moreover, search terms generate related information across categories.
Acceptable content for Web of Knowledge is determined by an evaluation and selection process based on the following criteria: impact, influence, timeliness, peer review, and geographic representation.

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