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Welcome to Economics.SE, the free, community-driven, Questions and Answers site for economists.

• This site is for Questions and answers and is not a forum. This means that there is a quite strict format enforced here. Please post an answerable question using the Ask Question button (after searching for existing similar questions first of course) or post a solution for an existing question as an answer post. Please do not start discussions or ask off-topic questions. You can also post comments to questions and answers to provide feedback. At first you can only comment on your own questions and their answers, but after you have gained a reputation of 50 you can comment everywhere. There is also chat for more casual posts.

Here is some information to help you get started, to supplement the Help Center, and to make your work with this site a pleasant experience for you and all other users.

Not all questions with some economic-financial content are on-topic here. Here is a differentiation.

Off-topic

• Personal finance: Personal matters of finance and investment are offtopic here. Have a go at Personal Finance & Money.
• Accounting: Accounting is a separate discipline, and there is no StackExchange site dedicated to that matter yet. But a proposal for an Accounting.SE site is currently trying to get off the ground, you could help.
• Too broad questions: We are dealing with a scientific discipline here, and science works by initially narrowing its focus in order to be able to go deep. We suggest you do the same: narrow the focus of your question. In social sciences, very rarely do we have truly "universal laws", and Economics is no different.
• Opinion-requests: it is natural to want some expert to evaluate, or to make a value-judgement on, something that preoccupies you: But questions like "Is communism better than capitalism? Is money a sin?" are off-topic here.Try to ask something that a member can answer using facts, studies, economic theory and reasoning -not moral/political/religious/philosophical values.

On-topic, but

The following topics belong to economics and are welcome here. However, there may be a different StackExchange community with a more narrow focus, where you might get an answer of higher quality:

• Financial Economics: There is also Quantitative Finance.
• Corporate Finance/Business Economics: Corporate Finance/Business Economics is usually either really simple Economics, or horribly complex applied micro-macro-economic-o-metrics (and then some). Fire away and ask though, and we will see what happens.

On-topic

• Econometrics: Totally on topic, but especially for theoretical questions, you may subsequently try the "All of Statistics" .SE site Cross-Validated.
• Software questions: Questions related to software used in economics and econometrics, are on-topic here.
• Literature/books requests
• Queries for Data: Queries for Data sets and data in general are on-topic here. You can also try the Open Data SE site.

Homework questions are subject to their own policy, which can be found at Economics.SE Policy on Homework Questions.

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