Economic agents make decisions in particular models. These models do not need to be related to financial contexts, and economics can be used to describe how agents will act in any other field in which humans act. As an example, how would economic principles be applied to the process of a democratic election? Solution Long story short: Preferences orderings are over more abstract outcomes instead of money. It\'s still a story of maximizing expected utility. Agents are usually assumed to have preferences over outcomes. This is assuming something like consequentialism. In financial models, the outcomes are dollar amounts and so there is a natural preference ordering. In something like a political model, outcomes are policies. So, people have indirect preferences over political candidates based on beliefs and seek to influence the outcome by voting. This is probably a bad model of voting, as most people don\'t honestly believe their vote matters I\'m guessing. Beyond voting to influence current decision-making, here is a good paper about voting as communicating: Piketty (2000).

1. Economic data is a very broad concept. It can include discrete preference relation data-sets as
well as extensive time series data.
But it is important that theories are tested against data, and the earlier this happens in the
development of an economic model, or of a new economic hypothesis, the more beneficial will
be to the researcher, providing early signals on how good or bad a match with the real world his
theoretical endeavors are. Economics being a Social Science, it is also important to have plentiful
of different data sets, since testing a theory on just one data set does not provide strong enough
evidence of the model's usefulness or uselessness.
So I am posting this question with the hope that it will be gradually enhanced with answers and it
will become a point of reference for Economic data of all sorts for this community.
My offering: The World Bank for example has very useful information on trade lanes. Other
repositories:
-Data links hosted at the Econometrics Journal
-Data archive of the Journal of Applied Econometrics
-Supplemental material for Econometrica
Solution
Be more specific on what you need. Quandl would be a pretty general source which hasn't been
mentioned yet. For macro data the St. Louis Fed is pretty good and thorough. Eurostat for
European data. historicalstatistics.org for historical data.