Doing Economics

6.7.1 Blogging

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Though there is no way for me to know what the counterfactual would look
like, I am 99 percent confident you would not be reading this book if, in
December 2010, I had not decided to buy the marcfbellemare.com domain
name and install a blogging platform on it, and write my first post the next
day. Over the years, blogging (interacted with my use of other social media
platforms) has done wonders for me in many, many ways, but off the top of
my head, I can think of three such ways.
First, blogging made me a better writer and researcher. Though it is
obvious that writing blog posts would make one a better writer, it is much
less obvious that doing so would make one a better researcher. But writing
for a broader public than the one your research papers are intended to (i.e.,
writing for a public composed of colleagues in other disciplines with an
interest in the topics you are working on—science reporters, policy makers,
and other economists) really helps clarify your thinking about the things
you are working on. I have lost count of the number of times I started
writing a blog post believing I had a solid grasp on the topic I was about to
write about, only to realize along the way that I did not, which ultimately
made me work much harder at understanding that topic. Because economics
is fairly open (i.e., we present early versions of papers at seminars and
conferences and circulate working papers, and findings are not embargoed),
the wonderful thing about blogging as a research economist is that it is
perfectly fine to write blog posts about a paper (or even about specific parts
of a paper) you are working on, as this is a good means of clarifying your
thinking, and having a conversation with other scholars about it. This can
lead to pretty clear improvements in a paper, if only because someone might
suggest a few robustness checks or data sources you had not thought about.
Second, blogging helps maximize your impact as a scholar. When I
release a new working paper, I post about it. When that paper gets accepted
for publication, I post about it again. And when that paper gets published, I
post about it once more. Although there is a great deal of overlap in terms
of who originally sees those three posts, each post is also seen by new
people, because it gets shared (and re-shared) by different people every
time. Blogging about a working paper (and then about the accepted and
published versions of the paper) allows generating buzz for the paper’s
findings, which leads to your work getting cited more by other scholars.
Equally important, blogging about a paper also associates your name with
the topics you are working on, which also leads to more citations, if only

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because people will be quick to suggest your name to others working on
those topics.
Third, and more broadly, blogging allows you to define who you are as a
scholar instead of letting others do so. One of the reasons that pushed me to
start a blog in the first place was that at that time in my career, I was
surrounded by colleagues who were at best indifferent to what I was doing,
and those colleagues would be the ones voting on whether I would get
tenure. So I first wanted to make sure to publicly define myself in my own
words to prevent any mischaracterization of my research agenda, and
second, I wanted to get my name out there so that people who were hiring
the year I was up for tenure would have heard about me. As it turns out,
when I was indeed denied tenure in 2012, the person who was most
instrumental in getting me to the University of Minnesota was someone
who had learned about my research because of my blog.
Consistent with the foregoing, McKenzie and Özler (2014) show that
economics blogs play an important role in the dissemination of knowledge,
they raise the profile of bloggers and their institution, and they improve the
knowledge of the blog’s subject matter for the average reader.