Review

I felt like I barely did any serious reading this year, and maybe that’s even true, but my read folder contains 168 papers for 2023, so even subtracting the ones that are in there by mistake, that’s enough to pick a few highlights. As usual, I hesitate to call these favorites, but I learned something from them. They are in no particular order except chronological by when I read them.

A list of 10 papers I read and liked in 2021. As in previous years, this is by date read rather than released or published, and selection is in no particular order. Overall, my list reflects my interests this year, prompted by research and teaching, in online learning, micro-founded macro, and causal inference, and, to the extent possible, intersections of these areas. As usual, I’m likely to have missed a lot of great work even in areas on which I focus, so absence likely indicates that I didn’t see it, or it’s on my ever expanding to read list, so ping me with your recommendations!

The following is a look back at my reading for 2020, identifying a totally subjective set of the top 10 papers I read this year. My reading patterns, as usual, have not been so systematic, so if your brilliant work is missing it either slipped past my attention or is living in an ever-expanding set of folders and browser tabs on my to-read list. I’ll exclude papers I refereed, for privacy purposes (a fair amount if you include conferences and also cutting out a lot of the macroeconomics from my list).

Inspired by Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and following on Noah Smith and others in an end of-year tradition, here is a not-quite-ordered list of the top 10-ish papers I read in 2017. I read too many arxiv preprints and older papers to choose ones based on actual publication date, so these are chosen from the “Read in 2017” folder of my reference manager, which tells me that I have somehow read 176 papers (so far) in 2017.

So, inspired by Brian and the general spirit of end-of-year reflection, some thoughts on what I’ve read this year. According to my reference manager software, I’ve read 183 papers this year, which is somewhat overstated because many were read last year but are dated incorrectly, and a substantial portion of the list contains slides, lecture notes, or other documents not quite meriting the status of article.