ECON 452: Economics of Global Pandemics: Home

This library guide is meant to support your research for assignments in ECON 452: Exploring the Economics of Global Pandemics. Email Nancy or schedule a meeting to talk about your research and ask questions. Don't waste your time- if you've spent 30 minutes searching and it's not working, that's when you should talk to Nancy.

Keep track of your articles! Use Zotero to save the articles you find and generate citations for your bibliography.

Advanced Google Searching will be your friend.

You'll be using several types of sources in this class. Here are the terms and definitions for source types as used in this library guide:

• Peer-reviewed or scholarly literature:
  • articles about research written by scholars that are reviewed by other scholars before they're published in academic journals
  • Anatomy of a Scholarly Article

• Working Papers
  • "research papers that have not been published in a journal or vetted through a peer-review process." (source)
• News & Opinion Magazines

  • tend to contain investigative journalism as well as commentary/editorials.  They often explore current events or ongoing debates in society.  Some showcase a variety of perspectives, while others tilt in an ideological direction. Others are intensely ideological or partisan, but they still fall into the general category of news and opinion magazines

  • though not peer-reviewed, news articles from reputable & specialist publications (like The Economist, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times) are essential to studying economics the current pandemic

  • contemporary accounts are useful for studying past pandemics/epidemics to learn & understand what analysis was being done and reported on at the time
  • Learn about Evaluating News Sources
• Industry Reports
  • a comprehensive account of a particular industry, containing a depth of information, facts and statistics. (source)
• Trade Publications
  • these keep professionals up to speed on a given industry’s trends, debates, news, professional development opportunities, and best practices. Sometimes trade publications have articles that contain a few citations, but they are not the forum in which scholars share original research studies and literature reviews.
  • Will be extremely helpful in completing your Industry Research assignment

Install UnPaywall browser extentsion for free full-text articles

1. Go to unpaywall.org.
2. Click "Get the extension"
3. UnPaywall will provide links for free full-text articles when available

Get library access through Google Scholar

1. Go to the Google Scholar homepage.
2. Click on the 3 lines in the top left corner, select settings.
3. Choose "Library Links" from the menu on the left side.
4. Search for "University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill - Find article @ UNC".
5. Check the box next to the appropriate name.

Current Events Forum Posts

Search in article & news databases, or specific publications, to find reputable sources on current events. Use Advanced Google search techniques to cut through the noise of Google search results.

Covid-Journal

Center for Disease Control: U.S. Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report.

U.S. Economic Indicators

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Page

Find more information sources on these pages: Articles & Reports, Data

Learning from Past Pandemics presentation and reflection

• Uncurrent Events: Epidemics, Pandemics, and the Economy: Use this post from the St. Louis Federal Reserve's site FRASER as a starting place
• Cambridge World History of Human Disease: subchapters on a ton of diseases including pandemics (like the black plague, etc) and also has chapters on disease ecology of different regions
• Historical Abstracts: search for specific pandemics in this database of general world history

COVID across the Globe presentation and reflection

To find infection & death rates, I'd probably start by googling for the country's public health agency (their equivalent of the CDC). However, like the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker in the U.S., there might be an alternate source of data in the country you're studying. Remember to think about questions like whether the data include presumed COVID deaths, what are the country's testing rates, if they're counting deaths in nursing homes or the equivalent, etc.

Monetary & fiscal policy measures will likely be reported on in news sources.

Industry-specific effects of the pandemic presentation

Take a look at the Industry Research page of this guide.