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Economics

Economics and Data Librarian

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Michael Deike
Contact:

Thomas Mahaffey, Jr. Business Library
L001D Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556

(574) 631-1450
mdeike@nd.edu

Overview of Economics

 [Economics is] the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources, or the study of decision-making. Economics often involves topics like wealth, finance, recessions, and banking, leading to the misconception that economics is all about money and the stock market. Actually, it's a much broader discipline that helps us understand historical trends, interpret today's headlines, and make predictions for coming decades. 

Economics can be broadly divided into two main branches, microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics studies how individuals make choices under constraints. Macroeconomics studies the economy on a large scale. Central to economics as a discipline are models—theoretical, stylized constructs representing and describing economic processes. Statistical methods and tools are constantly being developed to take economic models to data in the field of econometrics.

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