Recommended Readings
Here we recommend high quality readings by external authorities, touching on our mission on to transform strategy development. These are works we wish we had written, but did not.
Vaswani, A., N. Shazeer, N. Parmar, J. Uszkoreit, L. Jones, A.N. Gomez, L. Kaiser, & I. Polosukhin (2017): Attention Is All You Need
In 2017, Google and the University of Toronto published this paper that revolutionized AI by introducing the concept of transformers. It is a surprisingly short and easy read (but not easy to understand). Flip through it, and if you are mathematically minded, read it. After all, this has had more immediate impact on humanity than anything before it.
Ananthaswamy, A. (2024): Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI. Dutton
This magnificent book is the best introduction to AI we know of. It does not shy away from the math (unlike most science books for lay audiences). It also gives the history of AI starting in 1943 with the Perceptron and covers the seminal conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 when the term Artificial Intelligence was coined (Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence).
A. Banerjee and E. Duflo: The Economic Lives of the Poor. JEP
This groundbreaking easy-to-read paper on the lives of poor people around the world was a main contributor to their Nobel Prize in Economics award. It has influnced our quantification of socioeconomic levels. 🇴🇵ᴇ🇳 🇦🇨🇨ᴇꜱꜱ
M. Rossi (2013): Exchange Rate Predictability. JEL
This brilliant paper explains why a random walk is the best predictor of future exchange rates in the long run. Many snake oil sellers claim to have better models, but it all false.
A. Al-Haschimi et al. (2025): Why Competition with China is Getting Tougher than Ever. ECB
This comparative paper between China and the Eurozone is amazingly fact based. Much is to be learned from their approach beyond the interesting topic.
Stata: Analyzing Federal Reserve Posture with Stata Structural Break Tests
This is for statistics experts (PhD required). It is an insightful analysis of how the Federal Reserve switches between full employment and low inflation postures, its two goals.
B. Gompertz (1825): On the Nature of the Function Expressive of the Law of Human Mortality, and on a New Mode of Determining the Value of Life Contingencies. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London
This 200 year old paper is fascinating to flip through. It lays out the idea of s-curves for the first time in social sciences with deep mathematical logic. It alos show the painstaking work on logaithms he had to do when calculators or computers where not available.