Mario Draghi is now drawing as much attention in the debate on the Eurozone as Angela Merkel.
In the last decade it has become increasingly popular for academic journals to publish their impact factors on the cover.
Essentially impact factors just represent what is common wisdom; that some publications matter more than others, and impact factors attempt to quantify this.
Today we are publishing the Onalytica Influence Index for economics blogs. The top 100 can be seen below. (Methodology after the list)
We use our standard methodology for measuring influence: All references and citations between the blogs are fed into an Input/Output model (How appropriate to use the work of the 1973 Economics Nobel Prize laureate to calculate the impact factors for economic blogs).
The table contains metrics for each blog: InfluenceIndex, Popularity and Over-Influence.
InfluenceIndex is the impact factor, normalised to the value of the most influential blog.
Popularity represents how popular or well-known the blog is among other economics blogs.
Over–Influence seeks to capture how influential a blog is compared to how popular it is. There is a fairly linear (r2=~0.93) relationship between how popular or well-known a blog is and its influence. However some blogs carry more influence than their popularity leads us to believe; this is what we call over-influence. The blog Fight Entropy for example has an over-influence value of 1.9, meaning it carries 90% more influence that we would expect from how well-known it is. Conversely, if a blog has an over-influence of 0.8 it only carries 80% of the influence we would expect from how well-known it is.
If a blog is over-influential there is only one possible explanation: Those who reference or cite the blog have themselves more than average influence.
The list shows, that the combination of a premier newspaper and Nobel Prize winner is hard to beat.
At Onalytica we have been in the business of measuring influence since 2004. Our clients use the influence we calculate in two ways. First, they use it to understand who are influential in the debate and who is gaining and loosing influence. However, the second usage is the most important: By applying the influence weights of each stakeholder when analysing their views and statements we can transform the online noise into excellent predictions about the present and the future.
To learn more about our work on Influence click on the influence tag on the blog.
Thanks to Oliver Brown for helping with data and suggestions.
Blogs mentioned:
The Conscience of a Liberal (Paul Krugman)
Tim Duy's Fed Watch
Marginal Revolution
Econbrowser
Naked Capitalism
The Money Illusion
Library of Economics and Liberty
Brad Delong
Freakonomics
The Big Picture
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
Crooked Timber
Calculated Risk
Overcoming Bias
Cafe Hayek
Interfluidity
Zero Hedge
Modeled Behaviour
Chris Blattman
Next New Deal
Economic Principals
Stumbling and Mumbling
Andrew Gelman
Credit Writedowns
The Baseline Scenario
Keith Hennessey
Rortybomb
Dani Rodrik's weblog
A Fistful Of Euros
John Quiggin
Conf. of a Supply-Side Liberal
The Undercover Economist
InfectiousGreed
John Kay
Adam Smith Institute
Organizations and Markets
Environmental Economics
Brett Keller
Liberty Street Economics
Mainly Macro
The Becker-Posner Blog
Multiplier Effect
Orgtheory.net
Patrick Chovanec
Growthology
Division of Labour
Firedoglake
Daniel W. Drezner
EconomistMom.com
Angry Bear
Historinhas
CoRE Economics
Dynamist.com
New Economist
David Smith's EconomicsUK.com
Institutional Economics
Stan Collender
IMF direct
Kantoos Economics
Winterspeak.com
Knowledge Problem
Noahpinion
Peter Gordon's Blog
Increasing Marginal Utility
Alpha.Sources.CV
The Capital Spectator
China Financial Markets
Neighborhood effects
TaxProf Blog
Club For Growth
Economics Intelligence
History Squared
Open Economics
Roubini
EclectEcon Economics Studies
Businomics Blog
Evolving Economics
A Fine Theorem
Chicago Boyz
Thomas Palley
Against Monopoly
Mostly Economics
Aid Thoughts
voluntaryXchange
Ludwig von Mises Institute
EclectEcon
Aplia Econ Blog
Duncan’s Economic Blog
Fight Entropy
EconWeekly
Forest Policy - Forest Practice
Macro Business
All Road Leads to China
Don't worry, I'm an Economist!
Marc Gunther
Truth on the Market
Macro Man
Pannell discussions
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
The RePEc Blog
Earlier this week I looked at the use of the word ‘recession’ in the context of the UK economy. Following the downgrade of the US debt I had a similar look at the debate on the US economy.
The first chart shows the share of online mentions that use the word ‘recession’ in relation to the US economy.
It is clear that there has been a substantial increase in the index since March and that the level in August has surpassed the previous peak of August last year.
But while the mentions of Ben Bernanke seemed to correlate well with the mentions of recession last year, the story is different this time. Notice how the focus on Bernanke has gone down in July and August when the focus on ‘recession’ has gone up.
The explanation might be that the problems this time around are more centred on political issues or the inability of politicians to deal with the issues.
The second chart seems to indicate that this time there is a better correlation between the mentions of ‘politicians’ and ‘recession’ than ‘Bernanke’ and ‘recession’.
Note: The charts are adjusted for the measured influence each “voice” has in the debate on the US economy. For example, compared with the New York Times (the most influential), FT weighs in with 59%, Guardian with 43% and the blog Seeking Alpha with 15%
My colleague Tom Flaye recently introduced me to the Recession index, an index developed by The Economist that tracks the mentions of the word ‘Recession’ in New York Times and Washington post.
It inspired me to take a look at the UK economy in InfluenceMonitor and it came up with an interesting graph.
The graph below shows the share of online articles and blog posts (not just the newspapers used in the original R-index) that mention the word ‘recession’ when they also mention the UK economy.
The blue line is where all articles and blog posts are weighted equal and the red line is where they are adjusted for their measured influence in the debate on the UK economy.
The green line (Gap) shows the percentage difference between the 2 lines.
Although the direction of both the blue and the red line would (according to the R-Index) indicate that the UK Economy is not on its way to a recession the sharp increase of the gap (green line) indicates that those with more influence in the debate on the UK economy have substantially increased their mentions of the R-word compared with other (and less influential) commentators.
Greece used to be a focal point in the debate on the global economy but in the last couple of week the attention has been dwarfed by the debate on the US debt ceiling.
It will be interesting to see if the attention returns to Greece once the US gets the debt ceiling sorted.
