Rhetoric and Success in Economics

This is a seriously cool paper by Hugo Mialon:

http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~hmialon/Poetry.pdf

The abstract:

Is economics an art? I address this old, but important, question empirically by examining the impact of rhetorical features of the titles of published economics articles on the ultimate success of these articles, as measured by their cumulative citations over the six-year period following their publication. Twenty-eight percent of articles in the sample have a fresh figure of speech in their title. Surprisingly, adding a rhetorical device to the title of an empirical article adds more than four citations to the article's "lifetime" count, which represents about twenty percent of the lifetime citations of the average empirical article. This result testifies to the continuing power of rhetoric and poetry in economics science.