Replication
I tend to replicate all the articles and books I read. I usually do not understand everything immediately, and then I redo all the math or recreate plots/tables with R or Python step-by-step. This is more or less an application of the quote by Paul Halmos: “Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?”
Here are some of the articles and books I have replicated:
Feenstra, Robert C. 2004. Advanced International Trade: Theory and Evidence. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Tables replication with R.
Melitz, Marc J. 2003. “The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity.” Econometrica 71 (6): 1695-1725. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0262.00467. Math step by step.
Peters, Margaret E. Trading barriers: immigration and the remaking of globalization. Princeton University Press, 2017. Tables replication with R.
Santos Silva, Joao, and Silvana Tenreyro. 2006. “The Log of Gravity.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 88 (4): 641-58. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.88.4.641. Tables replication witn R.
Yotov, Yoto V., Roberta Piermartini, José-Antonio Monteiro, and Mario Larch. 2017. An Advanced Guide to Trade Policy Analysis: The Structural Gravity Model. United Nations. https://doi.org/10.18356/57a768e5-en. Tables and figures replication with R.