Here’s the status of the 2008 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge now that the tournament is down to 16 surviving teams.

If you’d just bet on the higher-seeded team for each of the first two rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, you would have correctly picked 24 of the 32 first-round winners and 11 of the 16 second-round winners, which would have put you ahead of 93% of the 3 million plus entries in the ESPN tournament challenge. However, that performance would only be good enough to tie for 19th place in the elite Econbrowser group.

My entry did slightly better than that benchmark, hitting 12 of the second-round winners. That was good enough to get into a tie for fifth within the Econbrowser group, and dare I mention puts me in a tie for first place over in the Environmental Economics group.

For now, anyway. But somehow I think not for long.