An Evaluation of 50 "Ranked" Economics Departments: By Quantity and Quality of Faculty Publications and Graduate Student Placement and Research Success

Abstract

There is an established literary tradition in the economics profession of attempting to rank the economics in the United States. According to Graves, Marchand and Thompson (GMT) [10], such endeavors serve two useful functions: (1) among faculty members, rankings constitute low information-cost proxy for the quality of the research environment at particular institutions, and (2) for students concerned about post-Ph.D. completion employment prospects, rankings may be indicative of those opportunities [10]. Indeed, they argue, rankings may be used directly and indirectly as a proxy for employment opportunities, since they may serve simultaneously as a screening device for employers and as a proxy by students for expected quality of dissertation research in topranked departments [10]. The criteria employed by constructors of ranking schemes range from the origins of papers presented at the American Economic Association annual meetings to opinion surveys of department heads and senior economists [6; 17; 4] to measures of departmental productivity, as proxied by publication in some sample of the economics journals [15; 16; 14; 12; 3; 10; 1 1].' Efforts to compare the ratings resulting from these quite different criteria reveal a fairly high degree of consistency among the rankings [21]. Although ratings based on quantity of published output appear to enjoy substantial peer approval among academic economists (as indicated by the repeatedly successful publication efforts of authors employing this criterion), at least two alternative rating schemes have been proposed, which are based on revealed quality of top faculties. Dean [7] bases his index on origins of journal referees -an approach that is both insightful and flawed (as