U. professors launch Microeconomic Insights in collaboration with professors from other universities

Microeconomic Insights, a websitedeveloped by University professors and professors from other institutions worldwide, including Harvard University and the London School of Economics, was launched last week.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a London-based organization, will be hosting the website. IFS research director and University College London professor Richard Blundell, who serves on the website’s editorial board, noted that the website aims to provide summaries of new microeconomic research for the public domain, in a way that is not affected by political and ideological viewpoints.

University professor of economics Stephen Redding, who also serves on the website’s editorial board, said that the editorial board, comprised of economics professors from several institutions worldwide, would manage the website’s content by seeking out new economic research papers and working with their authors, as well as professional journalists, to distill the findings into a clear, more easily understandable summary.

“We would hope that through these new methods, policy makers would get a better sense of what the effect of their policy would be,” he said.

Redding explained that the website offers a unique perspective on microeconomic research, especially because it focuses on distilling research that includes complex structural or technical elements or that requires a lot of mathematical precision and analysis.

“It can be very hard for someone who is not working within academic economics to fully understand the subtleties of all of those aspects of the research,” he explained. “Yet the research can have very clear and important implications for policy, and sometimes those implications can get lost because of the sort of barriers of people understanding the technical economic material.”

One of the concerns driving the website’s creation was that economic insights in the media did not always reflect or accurately convey the best research, University of California, San Diego economics professor Roger Gordon, a member of the editorial board, said.

Gordon noted that the publication process for each of the website’s stories includes the research paper’s authors drafting a non-technical summary of their findings and then working with professional writers and journalists who can further adapt the authors’ work to make it more understandable for the website’s readers.

“As academics we’re used to writing to each other,” he added. “And so we’re not willing to rely on ourselves to put together something that would be accessible to a much broader audience.”

The goal is to publish one new article each week, he noted.

UCL economics professor Orazio Attanasio, another member of the editorial board, explained the website will address the microeconomic aspects of several public policy issues, including tax systems, pension systems, regulation of different industries, design of welfare programs and development programs in different countries.

Redding explained that the editorial board has chosen papers to summarize that they find particularly impressive or noteworthy on the research frontier. Northwestern University economics professor Robert Porter, an editor of the website, said that the board will also look to cover research that has already been published.

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“[The editorial board] essentially has its antenna up to try to uncover research that might be worth some publicity, where there’s the understanding that that research has already gone through the journal editing process,” he explained.

University economics professor Uwe Reinhardt, who is not on the editorial board and was not involved in creating the website, said that the website draws attention to the idea that the discipline of economics should be a way to explain complicated relationships and interactions that people may not see on their own.

He noted that it is economists’ duty to understand these important relationships and then explain them to the people who make decisions and shape public policy.

According to Reinhardt, who has written over 200 columns explaining economic concepts for The New York Times, a challenge of writing about economics for the general public is that people do not always behave according to textbook economic theory.

“To actually make the right assumptions about human beings so that you don’t peddle to the wrong theory is very important,” he said.

He added that for a website like Microeconomic Insights, a concern would be whether the editorial board consists of economic purists, or if they will take into account people’s decisions like behavioral theorists. He said that he hopes the writers for the Microeconomic Insights website would write having in mind the reader and consumer, not what their academic colleagues think about it.

Porter noted that the website only just launched recently and that its impact remains to be seen. Redding noted that they will publicize the website’s content with social media tools such as Twitter, as well as sharing articles via email with a contact list including members of the Wilson School.