My Christmas Gift for all young economists is a free .pdf copy of my new book Introduction to Empirical Microeconomics. This book is written for college Freshmen but I think that all economics students can benefit from reading it. I have tried to take the "big ideas" that I learned from the University of Chicago's greats (Gary Becker, Jim Heckman and Sherwin Rosen) and write down a set of empirical problems. I argue that economists are detectives. We observe clues and from these clues we "invert" the model to try to pin down the goals of the rational decision maker. This "inverse problem" is at the heart of my new book. I spend a lot of time on the concept of utility function and production function "identification". From observing the choices of optimizing households and firms, what have learned about them? I also teach the reader how to use field experiment research designs to learn more about the diverse decision makers. For example, by rotating a budget constraint we can recover tighter bounds on a specific person's willingness to pay for a specific good.
My book celebrates revealed preference and provides a foundation for students who will enter the field of structural microeconometrics. My book uses no calculus and presents no econometrics ideas. It just uses algebra and some basic statistical theory.
This book is now in a "beta version" as I search for typos and wait for constructive criticism. My hope is that I will be asked to bundle it with these free books.