What's Hot in (Insert Your Field Here)

[sonicskat]

Hello All,
Congratulations to everyone that is finding a new home in august.

Anyways, I don't read economics all day, and I was curious about more of the frontier stuff in all of the subjects. From my persional experience, I have been lucky to see presentations from economists doing work in dynamic and computational economics, specifally on the Macro Side.

I was hoping we could all share what we know about the frontier work and economists in the fields that we all hope to specialize in. Thank you for all your imput...hopefully this will help people out as they figure out what to do with every second of the next 5 years of their lives.

[ekonomiks]

Both my broad interest (political economy) and narrow interest (modeling conflicts) are not mainstream economics but, in case anybody is interested, here's what I know:

The major growth areas within theoretical modeling are terrorism, insurgencies, or any kind of asymmetric conflicts. There's little empirical research in the field (not readily measurable concepts, shitty data sets, etc.), so there's a lot of potential for breakthroughs there. I am less informed about social choice and institutional stuff (dictatorship, democracy, etc.), but these areas seem to be in a developed state, which implies less room to grow. Very few economists work in the field, among them are Schelling (of course...), Garfinkel, Skaperdas. The prominent political scientists I can think of are Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (his son, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, does some interesting work too), James Fearon, Curt Signorino, James Morrow etc. Robert Powell is a political scientist with a PhD in economics.

[ekonomiks]

(double post)