1. Demand spillovers of smash-hit papers: evidence from the ‘Male Organ Incident’
- Author
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Tatu Westling, Otto Kässi, Department of Political and Economic Studies (2010-2017), and Economics
- Subjects
Regression discontinuity design ,Media ,Downloads ,Natural experiment ,Computer science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,education ,Blogs ,permanent inequality ,Spillover effect ,0502 economics and business ,Web page ,Difference in differences ,050207 economics ,Scholarly spillover ,health care economics and organizations ,media_common ,transitory inequality ,earnings dynamics ,050208 finance ,Multidisciplinary ,business.industry ,Research ,05 social sciences ,Internet search engines ,8. Economic growth ,Variance decomposition of forecast errors ,511 Economics ,Demographic economics ,Telecommunications ,business ,Publicity ,Earnings distribution ,variance decomposition - Abstract
This study explores the short-run spillover effects of popular research papers. We consider the publicity of ‘Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?’ as an exogenous shock to economics discussion paper demand, a natural experiment of a sort. In particular, we analyze how the very substantial visibility influenced the downloads of Helsinki Center of Economic Research discussion papers. Difference in differences and regression discontinuity analysis are conducted to elicit the spillover patterns. This study finds that the spillover effect to average economics paper demand is positive and statistically significant. It seems that hit papers increase the exposure of previously less downloaded papers. We find that part of the spillover effect could be attributable to Internet search engines’ influence on browsing behavior. Conforming to expected patterns, papers residing on the same web page as the hit paper evidence very significant increases in downloads which also supports the spillover thesis. JEL Classification A11, C21 MSC Classification 97K80 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2193-1801-2-168) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
- Published
- 2016