Library Guides: Economics: Behavioral

Selected Books

Misbehaving : The Making of Behavioral Economics.
Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Richard Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions.
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism
Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Daniel Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives--and how we can use different techniques to guard against mental glitches that get us into trouble.
Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being
Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions--at work, at school, and at home. The authors explain how our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save.

Organizations and Groups

Experimental Social Science Laboratory (XLab). Experimenal Social Science Laboratory at UC Berkeley. See the list of working papers.

Institute of Behavioral and Household Finance. Advances the study of the impact of psychology on investor decision-making and market fluctuations.

NBER Working Group on Behavioral Finance.

Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics.

Survey Research Center, Economic Behavior Program (University of Michigan),

Selected Journals

These journals are specific to Behavioral Economics, but researchers in the field also publish in many other economics journals.

Search Engines and Databases

Econlit. Most comprehensive database to scholarly journal articles in economics. Also lists books and dissertations, and articles within collective works.

IDEAS. Free database on economics with full-text working papers, books, book chapters, and articles from peer-reviewed journals.

PsychInfo. Indexes journals, conference proceedings, books, reports, and dissertations in psychology and related fields.

Social Science Research Network. Research network devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research.See especially the economics research network.

Sociological Abstracts. Indexes journals, books, dissertations, and reviews in the social sciences on sociological topics.

Selected Data Sources

Behavioral and experimental economics often rely on evidence created by experiments, such as those done at the Berkeley Xlab (see their list of working papers) but they also use survey data.

American Time Use Survey. Collects information on how people living in the United States spend their time. Estimates show the kinds of activities people do and the time spent doing them by sex, age, educational attainment, labor force status, and other characteristics, as well as by weekday and weekend day. Also in ICPSR.

Datahub for Field Experiments in Economics and Public Policy (IPA, J-PAL). Data from randomized experiments in the social sciences, including data from studies run by researchers associated with the Northwestern University Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT.

General Social Survey (GSS). Contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings. An easy to use version is available on the UC Berkeley SDA Archive.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Consortium of institutions working together to acquire and preserve social science data. Maintained at University of Michigan, ICPSR receives, processes, and distributes data on social phenomena in countries worldwide.

Odum Archive Dataverse. A repository for all Louis Harris public opinion data and Roper Center nonproprietary poll data, arranged by title, principal investigator, and subject.

Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Nationally representative sample of individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States collected continuously over time, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics.

Political Behavior Dataverse. Data sets from the Journal of Political Behavior - includes multiple surveys on a range of relevant behavioral political and economic topics.

Polling the Nations. Compilation of public opinion polls and surveys from more than 6,500 national, state, local and special surveys in the U.S. and over 60 other countries on over 3,000 social, political and economic issues

Roper. Domestic and international survey data. The Center's Public Opinion Location Library (iPOLL) gives online access to a database including poll questions asked in US from 1936 to present.

World Values Survey. Global research project that explores people’s values and beliefs, their stability or change over time and their impact on social and political development of the societies in different countries of the world.

Secondary menu

Economics: Behavioral

Selected Books

Organizations and Groups

Selected Journals

Search Engines and Databases

Selected Data Sources