The Economics of Economics Blogs

Last week, the World Bank blog Development Impact wrote about the influence of economics blogs on downloads of research papers. It included Freakonomics.com, as well as 5 other blogs — Aid Watch, Chris Blattman, NYT’s Economix, Marginal Revolution, and Paul Krugman. Using stats from Research Papers in Economics, it found spikes after blogs cover a paper. For us, they found that when we blogged a paper, there was an additional 450-470 abstract views and downloads that month. Check out their cool graph:

(Courtesy of Berk Ozler and David McKenzie)

This is part of a series Development Impact is doing on economics blogs. Part Two is on whether a blog increases the blogger’s profile and whether that effects policy. Part Three, just posted on Sunday, measures the causal impact of econ blogs by “using a variety of data sources and empirical techniques, we feel we have provided quantitative evidence that economic blogs are doing more than just providing a new source of procrastination for writers and readers.”
So there you go, from the World Bank itself. Freakonomics.com, changing the world one abstract at a time.