The most widely read woman economist is…
November 3, 2009Jon Brooks Comments Off
…not this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom. Nor is it Christina Romer, chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, or Laura Tyson, who held that position in the Clinton administration. According to the blog Economic Principals, which used Google Scholar to measure citation counts, the winner is Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland, co-author of This Time is Different:Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
From the Economic Principals post:
More to the point are the two electrifying papers that Reinhart and Rogoff brought to the yearly economic meetings in January 2008 and 2009. Both depended on a large historical data set the authors had compiled that in due course would be published as This Time Is Different. The first, “Is the 2007 US Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different? An International Historical Comparison,” persuaded a wide range of professional economists that the US economy was in for a terrific shaking – nine months before the banking crisis began.
The second, “The Aftermath of Financial Crises,” dispelled hopes that the recession would be an ordinary “v”-shaped variety, showing that financial crises, especially those involving asset bubbles, were almost always protracted affairs. Citations of the two papers are only now beginning to show up. Yet Reinhart and her co-authors have two papers with more than 2,000 citations and three more of around 1,000 each, dating back to 1993, analyzing previous crashes. Ordinarily, three or four papers of 300 citations or more are enough to make you a risen star: 575 for Christina Romer’s best-known paper, 265 for that of the more technical Athey.
So Carmen Reinhart. Remember that name. And you can read some of her book on Google Books.
