Skip to main content

The Internet

My blog has been going for just over a month, and it has had close to 2,000 hits, several of which have been from exotic locations such as Sierra Leone and Iraq - thanks to all my readers.  What an amazing thing the Internet is! 

I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era.  I remember my first introduction to the Internet in 1995, when I was a PhD student at Queen's University.  Sunny Teoh, a good friend from Malaysia, showed me how to browse in the Elmwood Computer Centre.  The first thing I searched for was <economist jokes> (click here for a taster).  I remember it like it was yesterday.  Today I use the Internet on a daily basis, and I can't imagine my working life without it.  But has it made me a more productive academic? 

On the plus side, I can now easily obtain papers and working papers at the click of a mouse.  I can also communicate with scholars around the world via email or Skype, and I can also book travel to conferences etc..  On the negative side, the Internet (particularly emails) can break my concentration and result in me wasting time as I get sidetracked whilst browsing.  This is one of the reasons I refuse to join Facebook and other such social networking sites! 


Ten Great Moments In Internet History

Popular posts from this blog

The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain's Captains of Industry

Michael Aldous and I had our book The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain's Captains of Industry published a few weeks ago. You can find out more about it and buy it at Cambridge University Press's website . It is also available at Amazon , Waterstones , and Barnes & Noble .  The CEO has already been reviewed in The Sunday Times , The Observer and Financial Times .
Read more

The Railway Mania

My colleague and former PhD student Gareth Campbell has created a website about the British Railway Mania - click here . This episode has been described by the Economist as probably the greatest bubble in human history. Gareth's website provides background on the Mania and posits some explanations for the 'bubble'. In his explanation of why the bubble happened, Gareth places a lot of emphasis on investor myopia regarding future dividends and uncalled capital. His study of investors during the episode does not support the view that this episode was fuelled by naive and irrational investors. 
Read more

How Valuable Are Connections?

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...
Read more