I am still alive

I logged in for the first time in years. I am surprised by the sustained traffic this blog is still getting after all those years, and this tempts me to pick up the blogging again. We shall see, but I am not too optimistic. Yes, this has been a long silence. I have been busy with new projects and challenges. I still am, although I have a bit more free time now. It has been interesting, to say the least. I have gone through a long list of comments to moderate. Lots of spam, but some genuine comments, too. I will try to be much more diligent on this, at least. 2023-11-19 update: I logged in again after several years. I still have not picked up blogging again, very busy professionally and privately, facing several challenges. Eventually, I'll get back to this, I promise.

A long silence

It is now over a month that I have not posted on this blog. Sorry, I am very busy and I have to focus on my day job while juggling with my private life. I'll get back to blogging once I have the time and the energy again.

Economic Logic, Too is posting

The companion blog, Economic Logic, Too that was created last December has started posting. This blog features similar posts to Economic Logic, but submitted by guest bloggers. Two posts are up, one is in the works, and I hope more will be coming. If you are reading this through an RSS feed, consider subscribing also to EL2 (RSS). And if you are interesting in posting, shoot me an email (submission rules).

Introducing "Economic Logic, Too"

I have been pondering for a while what to do with my blog, Economic Logic. My job responsibilities have made it difficult for me to attend to it as much as I would like. Sometimes I would have to skip days, sometimes I have not had time to read as much as I wanted (or I should as I got it wrong in one case). And I certainly have less time to write things up. Somebody suggested I should invite guest bloggers to help out. I am now ready to do this, but on a different blog, Economic Logic, Too.

Why keep them separate? EL got a reputation, and I would hate to ruin it. I have no idea how well this initiative will turn out with guest bloggers. I guess am too risk averse for allowing guest posters to alter EL. I hope they prove me wrong.

Here is how you can contribute to EL2 (this may be amended if need be):

1. I will accept discussions of interesting research and interesting discussions of research. That means it can also be rejected.
   
2. I may make a few small editorial corrections to the text.
   
3. There needs to be a link to an IDEAS page.
   
4. The research needs to be recent and in working paper form. This means it needs to be in Open Access (NBER and CEPR are OK) and unpublished.
   
5. You cannot discuss your own research. This is not voxEU.
   
6. You need to submit your text under your real name. It can be published anonymously, though.
   
7. Send me an email with your write-up, mention if you want it under a pseudonym or your real name.
   
8. I let you know about my decision as soon as I can.
   

Help make this a lively and interesting blog.

Building a reputation as online seller

A good reputation is difficult to earn and easy to lose. And reputation matters, think of monetary policy, auditing, medical doctors, restaurants, and politicians. With the Internet, online reviews and reputation have become important as well. I certainly take them into account before buying online. From the point of view of a seller, how do you build a reputations?

Ying Fan, Jiandong Ju and Mo Xiao got access to data to the major Chinese e-commerce platform to study the evolution of seller reputation. In particular, they have been able to trace the strategies and histories on sellers. They show that a good reputation is a great benefit, but that new sellers have a very hard time establishing it. Imagine you start with no reputation whatsoever and are competing with established sellers. To gain an edge, you need to resort to sales and attract attention in various ways, such as cross-listing your product all over the place. This is a lot of effort, and the authors argue that there is too much of it.

This reminds me of the early days of this blog. Being anonymous, I obviously started with no reputation and had to build it from scratch. With barely any readers, I started adding links to unrelated, but interesting stuff to attract more. That did not work, although this has worked for others (restaurant reviews come to mind). It took several years for readership to really pick up, and I thought several times about abandoning during that time.

Blog mentions: are they citations?

RePEc is putting up for vote some modifications to its rankings, including whether blog mentions should be counted as citations. The blog mentions are taken from EconAcademics, to which the present blog seems to be the largest contributor. So my opinion may matter whether I consider my mentioning of a paper to be equivalent to a citation.

Sometimes, I point out bad papers, and this should obviously not count as a citation. Of course, people often cite rather bad works because they want to improve on them, so nothing unusual here. Also, people often cite other works for strategic reasons, because the cited author is the editor, a potential referee, or otherwise powerful. Yet we still count that as a citation. A blog post, however, is entirely dedicated to a paper. I do not discuss it because I somehow want to gain favors with someone, as I am incognito. For other bloggers that may be different, though. What you get from my confused statements is that I am not quite sure blog mentions should count as citations. What I observe, though, is that authors do treat them differently. Never do you see an author listing a particular citation on a CV or homepage, but they sometimes do it for blog mentions. For this last reason, I tend to think a blog mention is even more than a citation, as long as there is some control over which blogs count, something EconAcademics does.

Five years of blogging

The Economic Logic blog is now five years old. At every anniversary, I reevaluate whether it is worth continuing in this effort. After all, there is little reward in blogging anonymously, rather the opposite, and writing here competes with my real world duties. And it has become more difficult since I took on some new responsibilities (some readers may have noticed that my posts were sometimes a bit short). However, readership has been steadily increasing and I have some sense of duty to keep posting. Stopping now cold turkey would definitely leave me empty. But I may consider skipping days here and there when my real world duties keep me away from my "second life."

So, I will keep posting for another year. There is still a lot of interesting research going on in Economics. And there is still a lot of papers that may not get published in the best journals but merit mentions because they have interesting implications. And sometimes there are some really bad papers that need to be pointed out before they do more damage.

Traditionally, I have pointed out with posts were the most read during the last year. For a variety of reasons, I can only find the three that were posted during 2012. By far the most popular was a very recent post, "How to make your children intelligent". The two next were "The Harvard Economics Department's Nobel problem" and "Mathematics, Econometrics and top economists' career outcomes".

I hope you will read Economic Logic for another year. I will be there.

On the state of economic research blogging

If you are an economist and maintain a blog, the best way to get an audience is to get into fights with pundits and journalists, and you then easily become a pundit yourself, losing the impartiality you are supposed to have as a scientist. The most popular economist bloggers are either openly libertarian or quite far right, or in reaction resolutely on the left. Almost all engage in politicking and wars of words and have basically abandoned the principles of impartiality their scientific upbringing taught them. The impartial scientists are drowned.

EconAcademics.org tries to rectify that, aggregating blog posts that discuss research, or at least refer to research. The list of monitored blogs is impressively long, yet it saddens me to see that the "popular" blogs are nowhere to be seen near the top of those who have discussed the most research, despite their considerable volume of posts. While I could be proud to be (far) ahead on this last list, it saddens me again how little consistent discussion of research there is. Out in the blogosphere, are we really so few economists doing this? Why can't the top economics blogs relate more to the results of their field?

A positive externality of EconAcademics.org is that is compiles a list of all papers I discussed, including where the ultimately got published. I have put the link in the sidebar and will come back to discuss it sometime soon.

Four years, 1000 posts

I am now entering the fifth year of blogging, and this is the 1000th post, which means I have discussed about one thousand papers. Personally, I find this an incredibly high number. In fact there are so many that I once discussed a paper a second time, forgetting I already did take care of it before.

This is also my yearly opportunity to reassess whether what I am doing here makes sense at all. I obviously get no outside reward for the blog, but that is OK. Only the top bloggers get recognition, and I am not one of them. So it is all about personal gratification, and I think I am still happy about doing it. It is sometimes a struggle to find the time to put things on "paper", but as I still enjoy it, I'll continue for another year.

This year of blogging was dominated by the Bruno Frey saga, which I believe has attracted quite a few new regular readers. That is noticeable because readers from Germany, Switzerland and Australia are much more frequent now. The blog seems also to have an unusually strong and loyal readership in Slovenia.

If you wonder what the most popular posts during this year were, here they are:

1. On the ethics of research cloning
   
2. Why boards keep bad CEOs
   
3. Keep CEOs off outside boards
   
4. Do we need awards in Economics?
   
5. The Bruno Frey bubble
   
6. Economists did see the bubble coming
   
7. What is an MBA worth?
   

I am also encouraged to see that discussion of the posts has picked up compared to previous years. Again, Bruno Frey has helped here, but it is also apparent in the regular posts about Economics research. Unfortunately, spam comments have started flocking to this blog, and I apologize that some make it live before I notice them.

Another year of blogging

How quickly that year passed, and I am once more amazed at the quantity I have posted. One hardly notices when you write a couple of paragraphs each day, but it sure accumulates: 271 posts during the year, 40 more than the previous year, reflecting the lack of vacation time...

Should I continue? I still like doing it, even though it takes much more time to write even two paragraphs about a paper than simply reading it. While I do not have credible statistics to back it up, I have the impression that I have a rather loyal (and mostly silent) readership. There are over 700 subscribers on the Google Reader I use, probably more elsewhere and through various relays. I only wish there were more discussions, although I understand it can be difficult to participate.

Comments averaged at two a post, a rather modest number. But some posts attracted a lively discussion. Here are the ones with the most comments:

1. Why criticize modern macro when you do not follow modern macro?
   
2. The economics of compartments
   
3. On the dangers of penny auctions, an example
   
4. Is democracy really worth it?
   
5. About this obsession with lawns
   
6. Doing Calvo all wrong
   
7. About the state of US higher education
   
8. Smoking bans versus tobacco taxation

And which were the most popular posts of the year?

1. The economics of compartments
   
2. Worker overconfidence and unemployment duration
   
3. What is an MBA worth? (from 2008!)
   
4. How to increase employment, and at what cost (from 2009)
   
5. On the dangers of penny auctions, an example
   
6. Is the US a third world country?
   
7. Posting calories in restaurants is Pareto improving
   
8. The AEA is missing a golden opportunity
   
9. The problem with experimental economics: people are weird
   
10. Household size heterogeneity and the representative agent

Anyway, here come another year of blogging on research in Economics.

Reciprocity in blogging networks

What makes a blog successful? Well, first define success. It can be the number of people reading it, the number of comments on it, or the revenue from advertisements. I do not have benchmarks to compare mine, but I am quite sure my blog does poorly on at least on three of these definitions. Thus, what am I doing wrong?

Alexia Gaudeul and Chiara Peroni may have the answer. They use LiveJournal to study how bloggers, write, comment and interact. The keys to success seems to be for the blogger to comment on other blogs, thus eliciting reciprocal comments. The blogger also needs to reply to comments on his own blog. This sounds like bloggers are only among themselves and form cliques and the one with the most friends wins. Just like in high school. But I think this is all coming from the dataset, which does not record lurkers and other outsiders.

Quite obviously, I am doing everything wrong. I hardly comment on other blogs. I do not continuously follow comments, as I only check them when it is time for another post and rarely follow up. I'll make an effort.

A look back at 2009

This is just a very selfish look back on the Economic Logic blog for 2009. Over the past year, I concentrated much more on discussing research, which has attracted, from what I can see, a larger and especially more loyal readership. And what was read the most?

1. The evil empire strikes again
   
2. Why so much teenage sex?
   
3. Who buys online porn
   
4. One more argument against banning child labor
   
5. Labor supply elasticity: micro versus macro estimates
   

Those that get more traffic are those that get referenced on other blogs, get sent around through emails and get traffic from non-regulars though Google. It looks like sex still sells. As for comments, they are still low but more numerous that last year. Those that attracted the most discussion were:

1. Journals are dead
   
2. Do new drugs reduce medical costs?
   
3. Development economics needs to refocus on theory
   
4. Exploiting sunk costs
   
5. A new look at the Laffer Curve
   
6. The poor living quarters of economists
   

It is interesting that the intersection between both sets is empty. That can happen when one picks the top five or six over 231 posts, but still intriguing.

Two years of blogging

It is now two years that I am blogging here. While two years seems like a re rather short time, it adds up to about 450 posts. All in all, imagine reading 400+ papers and provide your opinion about them. In retrospect, this is a huge task!

But I enjoy doing it, and it appears a growing readership does, too. While it obviously hampers the time I can devote to my own research, I still enjoy it. Again, I would hope this would generate a bit more discussion, and it has improved over last year. But still, do not hesitate to discuss my opinions or offer your own about the papers. And I especially encourage the discussed authors. Few took the opportunity so far.

Speaking of comments. The increase in popularity of Economic Logic implies also that it appeared on the radar of spam commenters. I try to keep up with them, but I have only so much time. Hence I have now started moderation of comments on older posts. Comments are still welcome, but given that for non-current posts the signal-to-noise ratio was becoming really low, I had to intervene.

Finally, consider a donation. I could be doing consulting work or writing more papers instead of this blog. There is a clear opportunity cost for me. So if you were pondering giving something to the lady that brings your daily junk mail, go for me instead...

Donations

As you may notice on the left bar, I have set up a donation button. Why? With the time I spend on this blog, not only writing but also cleaning spam comments, I figure that sooner or later the "lost" time will amount to a publication and the associated merit pay. So, I want to compensate this opportunity cost by allowing user to donate through PayPal. Not that I expect to strike it rich this way. I get personal satisfaction from the blog, so I do not expect complete compensation.

I have had Google ads as well for quite a while now, and they bring only peanuts. I have also had some requests for ads, which I have declined so far because they did not seem appropriate. But that may change.

Economic Logic is one year old!

I have already been posting for a year, and it has been fun doing so. While I started by commenting on the world around me from the perspective of an economist, I soon started discussing research. I guess it is just in my blood.

For those interested in blogging: it is quite a commitment to write on a regular basis, but it is rewarding in the sense that putting thoughts on "paper" allows one to put them in order, and sufficiently well for them to sustain the criticism of others. It is, however, somewhat time consuming. If I continue at this rhythm, it will cost me a paper a year, but I still think it is worth it.

While there are fewer comments than I anticipated, and while the readership is still rather confidential (although being featured on Econ Academics gave it a bump), I still hope I make some impact and get people interested in the topics I approach. Some posts had indeed some impact, here is a list:

The most viewed posts: Who will win the Olympics?, Why do people vote?, 2008=1929?

The most commented: Gas taxes are much too low, Illegal immigrants have rights that need to be defended, What is wrong with today's undergraduates?,

The most linked to: What is the FDIC thinking?, Blanchard's sad state of macroeconomics, I am upset.

In the comments section, I encourage you to state what you liked or disliked about the blog so far. It may or may not influence what I post in the future. But one thing is for sure: I will continue posting about research.

Economic Logic on IDEAS

It is possible on IDEAS to create reading lists. Economic Logic has now its own. It lists all papers discussed on this blog, along with alternative versions of them, in case readers cannot get access to a gated version. Also, the abstracts pages of the cited papers also have a link back to the reading list, thus allowing others to discover this blog.

Let's see whether this reading list will increase traffic here as much as Economic Logic's listing on Econ Academics did.

Economics Academics Blog

A new blog portal, Econ Academics, has been unveiled. It features blogs that discuss research in Economics, as opposed to current events or each other. I am happy not only to see mine featured, but also to discover a few other like-minded ones. And they are good. Check them out.

Results of the syndicating poll

Two weeks ago, I received an inquiry from Nouriel Roubini's RGE Monitor whether I would be willing to have some of my post featured integrally there. I have let the users of this blog vote on this offer and the results are in. Should I accept this offer?

• Yes, anything that publicizes this blog: 13 votes, 38%
  
• Only if money is involved: 6 votes, 17%
  
• No, they want to exploit me: 10 votes, 29%
  
• Whatever: 5 votes, 14%
  

What do I learn from this? First, there were actually 34 readers who bothered to vote, which is a good start. Second, there is no clear winner. A majority want me to participate (13+6), almost half seem to think serious money needs to be involved (6+10). I interpret this as: Go ahead, but make sure you get a fair cut from the deal.

So, I will now I will wait to hear from a RGE Monitor representative and see what it has to offer for me.

Syndicating this blog?

I just receive a message, also sent to 50 other bloggers, from Nouriel Roubini to become a contributor to RGE Monitor. His team would pick my post from this blog, vet them, and publish them on his blog, with attribution.

What is in it for me? A link back to my blog, a free subscription to the fee-based part of the RGE Monitor (valued at a whooping US$5000 a year), publicizing Economic Logic on the blog, and a "bio page" with a picture.

Note that there are already plenty of blog agregators out there, and anybody is free to create a blogroll like the one I have in the sidebar... I do not particularly value a subscription to something I was never tempted to read. A blog is to a great extend done for the readers, so I'll let my readers decide whether I should participate. I have added a poll in the side bar to that effect.

100 posts!

This is my 100th post on this blog, thus a good opportunity to see whether it is going in the right direction.

When I started this blog, I wanted not only to get a forum for my ideas, which does not make it different from most blogs, but also use some serious economic discourse for a wide spectrum of economic issues. By wide spectrum I mean beyond the stock market and political economy, for which there are already plenty of blogs.

Some told me that running a blog can be overwhelming, especially if one wants to post on a different topic everyday. Indeed, I confirm that it takes time, but I enjoy and I do let it overtake my other responsibilities, occasionally skipping a day.

Is it a success so far? Only the reader can judge. From traffic reports and the number of comments, I conclude that this blog is still rather confidential. The fact that I post anonymously probably does not help. But there are some good quality commentators, and I hope that eventually more people will stop by. Let me reassess after the first year of operation.