Category: Uncategorized

Celebrity economists

Garret FitzGerald recently referred to celebrity economists. Who might they be? According to one definition, a celebrity economist is more often cited by journalists and bloggers than by fellow economists in academic papers — the thought being that social visibility should be proportional to academic impact, or that lay perception of expertise should be related to peer recognition.

I picked 15 names of Ireland-based economists, google-newsed and publish-and-perished them. Here are the results.

Table 1. Number of hits in Google News, number of citations in Publish-or-Perish (i.e., Google Scholar) and Celebrity Index.

News P&P Celeb
D. McWilliams 1188 44 27.00
R. Lyons 119 5 23.80
C. Gurdgiev 113 17 6.65
S. Kinsella 31 5 6.20
C. McCarthy 710 139 5.11
J. Fitzgerald 571 393 1.45
A. Barrett 350 978 0.36
B. Lucey 199 628 0.32
M. Kelly 201 767 0.26
A. Ahearne 142 1119 0.13
J. McHale 62 928 0.07
K. Whelan 122 2000 0.06
R. Tol 242 6412 0.04
P. Lane 84 7384 0.01
J. Markusen 3 14573 0.00

The Euro Area Crisis: The Agenda for the New Irish Government

I will give a public lecture on this topic tomorrow evening (Wednesday April 6) at 6.30pm, as part of the Henry Grattan Lecture Series of TCD’s Policy Institute.

Venue: Jonathan Swift Theatre (Room 2041A), Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.

More details here.

Making fiscal policy more stabilising: Challenges and Policy Options

Anne-Marie Brook of NZ Treasury will give a talk on this topic in TCD tomorrow Wednesday April 6, 1pm-2pm, in IIIS Seminar Room (Level 6 TCD Arts Block).

All welcome.

Ken Rogoff on Indexed Debt

In this wide-ranging FT article, Ken Rogoff also advocates indexing debt to economic performance.

A couple of links

Here is an Italian estimate of the fiscal multiplier, which doesn’t have to rely on military expenditures as other authors (including myself) have done.

And here is an account of the German current account surplus which resonates with older theories of capital exports: it is, according to the author, anything but a testament to German ‘competitiveness’ (whatever ‘competitiveness’ means).