Catchy titles

Nothing pleases me more than having a clever title for an academic paper. Some that myself, co-authors or others have suggested for my papers include "First Author Conditions," "Licensing the Gale of Creative Destruction," "Inside the Black Box: A Look at the Container," and, of course, "Knowledge of Growth and the Growth of Knowledge."

[From Marginal Revolution] Hugo Mialon (Emory) has studied citation rates on academic papers in economics and has found, among other things, that catchy titles tend to increase citation rates for empirical papers but lower them for theoretical ones. Suffice it to say, most of my papers are theoretical, so this is bad news for me. I had better stick to titles like "Regulating Private Infrastructure Investment: Optimal Pricing for Access to Essential Facilities."