How has the Internet changed the way academics research and communicate in economics?
One big change is that the Internet has made pre-publication research very much easier to obtain. Academic economists have long circulated their research as “working papers” before submitting it for publication to peer-reviewed journals. I don’t know exactly when the first working papers were circulated, but the Cowles Foundation at Yale, which publishes an important series, lists papers dating back to 1955 on its website. In the pre-Internet era, these working papers were printed and mailed to individuals and departmental libraries. The Internet has made them much more easily accessible and searchable. In fact, Google Scholar’s sophisticated search has to some extent made the working paper series redundant, because it allows papers on individuals’ websites to easily be found, even if they are not issued in a working paper series. Another big change arises from the fact that the Internet allows information to be written to remote servers as well as read from them. In the pre-Internet e
