Recommended Reads, 19 August

Starting with this post, I'll be sharing a list of articles I've been reading a couple times each week. Today, I've been reading mostly about the finance and the economy, but it won't always be that way.

How To Spot Garbage in the News - Barry Ritholtz

I can randomly pick up any newspaper article or analyst report, and find holes and flaws merely by asking questions the author left unanswered. Active reading often leads to the conclusion that the vast majority of news is at best incomplete and uninformative, while a majority of research reports are full of biases and logical errors.

Before Jackson Hole,  Roundup of Yellen's Quotes on the Labor Market - Cardiff Garcia

In anticipation of the [Jackson Hole] speech, the economics team at Credit Suisse has rounded up some of Yellen’s quotes on the labour market since she became Fed chair earlier this year

Morningstar: A Force to be Reckoned With - Stephen Foley

What began in 1984 as a quarterly booklet providing data on 400 mutual funds, produced by former stock analyst Joe Mansueto from his one-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, has mushroomed into a $3bn company producing research on more than 200,000 funds, slicing and dicing the investment universe and stamping every fund with a “star rating” to reflect its performance history.

The Thing Employers Look for When Hiring New Graduates - Derek Thompson

When employers recently named the most important elements in hiring a recent graduate, college reputation, GPA, and courses finished at the bottom of the list

"Racist" Twin Cities maps make point about interstate highways - Aaron Rupar

By overlaying maps created in 1935 by sociologist Dr. Calvin Schmid for a study entitled, "Saga of Two Cities: An Ecological and Statistical Study of Social Trends in Minneapolis and St. Paul," with more recent maps of the interstate highway system, Maas aimed to show how interstates were built to bisect some of Minneapolis and St. Paul's poorest neighborhoods.

RBC Models We Can Believe In? - Noah Smith

In fact, if you put a gun to my head and asked me why recessions happen, first I'd kiss my ass goodbye, but then I'd say that some of them happen because of sector-specific productivity shocks, amplified by network effects and by some departures from Rational Expectations. Actually, there are a number of models popping up that try to model something like this, and I think it's a hugely interesting literature. Here are a couple examples, with abstracts