Using Economics Blogs to Teach Economic Principles

The proliferation of widely-read blogs in the social sciences presents a pedagogical opportunity for instructors of undergraduate courses. This paper describes the introduction of blog assignments by the authors in the fall of 2011 in five principles of microeconomics classes at Western Carolina University. Students were subsequently surveyed in order to assess the impact of blog assignments on their attitudes toward economics. The survey results indicate that the blog assignments appear to have stimulated student interest in economics, while also offering a number of advantages over traditional textbook-based homework assignments. In this paper, we make the case that blog assignments are an effective pedagogical tool in economics and should be similarly successful in other social science courses.

From a paper by James Ullmer & Stephen Miller.

Political Blogs

Do they matter? 

In authoritarian countries, the means to hold politicians and public officials accountable are limited, because traditional media is often censored, politics is not competitive, and electoral fraud prevents political turnover. Our results imply that posting in online social networks can affect the stock performance of state-controlled companies, and, as a result, can become an unusual alternative mechanism to put additional checks on the behavior of government officials even without a major change of the government.

We show that there are effects of two types. First, there is a short-term attention effect, which is limited to several hours after the blog posting and is easily diminished if some other interesting postings are made available at the same time. Second, there is a longer-term effect of blog postings that is more consistent with information story. Longer-term effects imply that, presumably, blog postings can provide incentives for the managers of state-controlled companies to behave well.

Source: Abstract, paper. 

St. Luis Fed blog aggregator for Economics Research. UDADISI is there.

Now you can follow EconAcademics.org, which is:

[A] blog aggregator for Economics research hosted by the Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [This is from their website].

UDADISI is part of the (long) list of blogs being monitored!

HT: Mostly Economics.  

Krugman on the Econoblogosphere

So, the starting point for me, when thinking about how economics works as a discipline, is to realize that the traditional model of submit, get refereed, publish, and then people will read your work broke down a long time ago. In fact, it had more or less fallen apart by the early 80s.Even then, nobody at a top school learned stuff by reading the journals; it was all working papers, with the journals serving as tombstones. 

. . . 

And journal publication? Well, tenure committees needed that, but it was so slow relative to the pace of ongoing work that it no longer acted as an information conduit. I presented my paper on target zones at a 1988 conference; by the time it was formally published, in 1991, I had to add a section on the subsequent literature, because there were around 150 derivative papers already out there. 

. . . 

So now we have rapid-fire exchange via blogs and online working papers — and I think it’s all good. Work circulates even faster than it did then, there are quick exchanges that can advance understanding, and while it’s still hard to break in, connections aren’t as important as they once were and the system is much more open. 

But, you say, doesn’t this allow a lot of really bad economics to circulate? Yes, but is it really any worse than it used to be? As I’ve tried to explain, the notion of journals as gatekeepers was largely fictional even 25 years ago. And I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how the whole refereeing/publication system has ever worked; all too often, it seems to act as a way for entrenched doctrines to blockade new ideas, or at least to keep people with new ideas from getting tenure at a good school. 

The major problem I see now is the disconnect between promotion and the real nature of intellectual discourse in the Internet age. But the quality of the discussion, it seems to me, is if anything higher than it was in the good old days.

That is from this awesome piece by Krugman. As positive as he is about econ-blogs, he underestimates their benefits. For economists living in developing countries blogs are a great source of information about the current debates. Usually blogs link to the most recent working papers. Blogs give the opportunity to scholars working in developing countries to reduce the knowledge gap. In this regard however I have two questions: (1) Why other scholars do not blog as much as economists do? and (2) Why some regions of the world are more into blogs than others. I think Latin America lags behind. Regarding the first question, may be other scholars, anthropologists, for example, are more resistant to change. Blogging requires taking risks -- spending time in something that might not bring a return [it has brought great returns to me!!!]. May be scholars in other disciplines are more risk averse than economists are. I still don't have a good theory for (2). [All the scholars in the developing world should blog!!!]

HT: Daniel Drezner

Advice for academic bloggers

Greg Weeks gives some advice:

. . . my first piece of advice is to ignore lists of advice.

Anything goes, he suggests. Blogging is fun, but when it is done spontaneously (e.g. when the muses get you). 

For me blogging responds to a main objective: share my curiosity for economic development - mainly academic research, but also short pieces of general interest, podcasts, and videos. The main source for my posts is SSRN which is free-access. I check this site once or twice a day and pick the articles that look interesting - those that have unexpected conclusions or those that might be of general interest, non only of interest to economists. I have realized that probably 90 or 95 % of new research in economics - working papers - confirms the expected: "we found that innovation leads to more economic growth" kind of research. The remaining 5% tend to be more "innovative," with unexpected and interesting findings. I focus on the 5%. 

I also subscribe to different lists at RePEc and get e-mail updates once or twice a week.

Very often I check the websites of journals I like which are related to economic development such as: Economic Development and Cultural Change or World Development, among others. These journals do not give access to papers, but it is likely that the working papers are online as drafts. 

I check often  some pretty interesting journals not necessarily related to economic development. They publish interesting articles such as The Journal of Economic Psychology, Economic Letters, or the Journal of Economic Surveys. The National Bureau of Economic Research has been a very good source as well. The Quarterly Journal of Economics has been a good source but not as often as the others. Other blogs also link to pretty interesting research such as Chris Blattman's Blog and Marginal Revolution. Krugman's and Mankiw do that to. 

The wonderful thing about economists is that most of the published papers are available as working papers online, somewhere else in the web. Alas, that is not very common in other social sciences. That is one of the reasons I think economics is definitely more vibrant than other social sciences. When economists publish their research online, it is commented on by bloggers. Bloggers make some papers more visible. And whatever the paper has to offer flourishes, the positives and negatives. 

HT: Lee Crawfurd

10 steps to better blogging

This is the fifth one:

Add context. Don’t assume people know what you’re talking about, especially if it’s obscure or technical. That doesn’t mean you need to rewrite five paragraphs of back-story for every new update to a news story — that’s usually a waste of time. But at least make sure that a good explanation of what’s going on is a click or two away.

This is the complete list, HT: Chris Blattman.  

At least for me there is a lot of good advice to improve.  

The monitoring power of blogs on published research

The role of blogs monitoring the media is well know. It is also well known their role monitoring the effectiveness of foreign aid (Give Well is an example), or monitoring the functions of international organizations (this is a bright example). More recently blogs are monitoring academic research. Two examples: 

The blog Economic Logic has commented on some well known cases of possible plagiarism. Note that this blog is written by an anonymous author, nonetheless its impact on academic opinion can not be minimized. 

The blog Retraction Watch reports and comments on published research that  has been retracted because of errors or plagiarism. This task is indeed very important. For example, the most recent post in Retraction Watch is this:

The RAND Corporation has retracted a study linking Los Angeles pot dispensaries to drops in crime, the Los Angeles Times reports. The problem: RAND hadn’t included data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The institute tells the Times, referring to RAND researchers: 

“They made mistakes,” said Debra Knopman, a Rand vice president and director of the infrastructure, safety and environment division. “What we’re wrestling with is how the mistakes went undetected.”

The report was peer-reviewed, RAND said, and retractions are uncommon: Read the rest of this entry » 

Krugman on blogs

Excellent piece on blogs by Paul Krugman 

Ryan Avent and I have been corresponding about the role of the economics blogosphere, for the Christmas issue of The Economist. I don’t know what parts of our conversation will actually show up there, but having assembled my thoughts I might as well put some of them up here.

The concern, or maybe just issue, is whether the rise of econoblogs is undermining the gatekeepers, whether any old Joe can now weigh in on economic debate, whereas in the good old days you had to publish in the journals, which meant getting through the refereeing process.

My take is that the system never worked like that — or at least not in my professional lifetime. And when you consider how economic discussion actually used to work, you see the blogs in a different and more favorable light.

First of all, policy-oriented research was never as centered on refereed journals as we liked to imagine. A lot of the discussion always took place via Federal Reserve and IMF working papers, and even reports from the research departments of investment banks. The rise and fall of Fed policy via targeting of aggregates, for example, was not a debate played out in the pages of the JPE and the QJE.

Second, even for more academic research, the journals ceased being a means of communication a long time ago – more than 20 years ago for sure. New research would be unveiled in seminars, circulated as NBER Working Papers, long before anything showed up in a journal. Whole literatures could flourish, mature, and grow decadent before the first article got properly published – this happened to me with target zones back in the late 1980s, where my original 1988 working paper had spawned a large derivative literature by the time it actually got published. The journals have long served as tombstones, certifications for tenure committees, rather than a forum in which ideas get argued.

What the blogs have done, in a way, is open up that process. Twenty years ago it was possible and even normal to get research into circulation and have everyone talking about it without having gone through the refereeing process – but you had to be part of a certain circle, and basically had to have graduated from a prestigious department, to be part of that game. Now you can break in from anywhere; although there’s still at any given time a sort of magic circle that’s hard to get into, it’s less formal and less defined by where you sit or where you went to school.

Since there’s some kind of conservation principle here, the fact that it’s easier for people with less formal credentials to get heard means that people who have those credentials are less guaranteed of respectful treatment. So yes, we’ve seen some famous names run into firestorms of criticism — *justified* criticism – even as some “nobodies” become players. That’s a good thing! Famous economists have been saying foolish things forever; now they get called on it.

And this process has showed what things are really like. If some famous economists seem to be showing themselves intellectually naked, it’s not really a change in their wardrobe, it’s the fact that it’s easier than it used to be for little boys to get a word in.

As you can see, I think this is all positive. The econoblogosphere makes it a lot harder for economists to shout down other people by pulling rank — although some of them still try — but that’s a good thing.

My five cents: blogs can put scholars of developing countries on the map. Yes, blogging means doing one's research as well, it implies thinking about topics, writing about them, and exposing the ideas to the world. And the best thing is that one does not need a research grant to do all this. 
(HT: Peter Boettke).

What topics are readers interested in when they read econ development blogs?

. . .  which shows the current trends in the field!!!
Source

Why do people read blogs -- in the field of economic development?

Source.

PS (same source). Location of readers:

Note the presence of several african countries and not a single Latin American country in the list of countries with most readers.

Some research questions come to mind. For example, is there a correlation between indices of free press and reading blogs, by country? Keep reading/looking, the whole report is very interesting . . . 

Blogging-abstract of the day: Are there differences between US and China? Of course

From Digital Library:
Enterprise blogging in a global context: comparing Chinese and American practices

We present three studies that compare adoption and appropriation between China and the United States of BlogCentral, an internal blogging tool employed by a large global enterprise. We first analyzed 23 months of usage logs for users in both countries and found that compared to the U.S., Chinese users were much less active, with less activity and sparser user interaction. We then conducted 25 interviews and surveyed 213 bloggers in both countries to understand user motivations and behaviors of corporate blogging in more detail. The results show that Chinese employees use internal blogs for organizing personal work and short term team formation, unlike U.S. users who are driven more by the goal of sharing information to a broad community. The Chinese users were seeking (and not finding) greater social interaction and felt instead a sense of alienation from the global blogging community. We further identify a gap between Chinese users' requirement for local community and the existing global aspect of enterprise blogging tools. Lastly we discuss implications from the data analysis.

Alas, I don't have access to the paper.

Interesting blog about migration, remittances, and development

Here