Berk and David continue their series of mini-papers on the impacts of economics blogs.
The best new bit: a rigorous impact evaluation of their blog on rigorous impact evaluations. A play within the play!
Also interesting: a survey of blog habits from development economists and field researchers. Here is their table of responses (click to expand):
The main takeaway from this table: Be afraid. Be very very afraid.
Some small portion of the research population is changing what they do because I blog YouTube videos of cats and my nanny diaries.
Aid Watch is no more, and Dani has slowed his blogging. This is perilous for the profession. I repeat my offer to assist fellow development professors start up a blog…
2 Responses
It is interesting that the demographic that probably has the worst internet access (field staff) is also most likely to read blogs daily.
I suspect statistics on number of papers read are inflated for field staff, since we are hesitant to admit we haven’t read seminal papers, especially papers the researchers we work for wrote! I know people who opted out of taking this survey for that reason. I’m not sure to what extent this might apply to other demographics.
I think that development and economics blogs are produced by a single authority-just like cat videos are produced by Kittywood Studios ;))
If Kittywood Studios produces all the cat videos then who is writing all these blogs?!
http://aidnography.blogspot.com/2011/08/if-kittywood-studios-produces-all-cat.html