wrong, rogue and booklog

Economic blogs are doing more than providing a new source of procrastination for writers and readers. Using a variety of empirical approaches, we have provided the first quantitative evidence that they are having impacts. There are large impacts on dissemination of research – a link on a popular blog results in a substantial increase in abstract views and downloads, while a majority of economics blog readers say they have read a new paper in the past month as a result of a blog. There also appear to be benefits in terms of the bloggers becoming better known and more respected within the profession – bloggers are over-represented relative to their academic publication records in a poll of favorite economists, and readers of a new blog have become more aware of the researchers writing it. Finally, we find some evidence from our experiment that blogs influence attitudes and knowledge: readers of the new Development Impact blog think more highly of World Bank research and are more interested in working in this institution, and the average reader may have gained knowledge about the contents of recent research papers as a result of reading this blog.

,,, our results show that there are a number of positive externalities from economics blogs that are unlikely to be captured by the blogger him or herself: bloggers increase the dissemination of other people‟s research (in addition to their own work), and can have positive effects on the reputation of their institutions. The presence of these externalities, coupled with costs to blogging (such as the time cost), suggest that there may be an undersupply of good economics blogs.