patterns of co authorship among economics departments in the usa given the steady increase in co authored papers in economics journals this paper reports a study of the patterns of co authorship between us universities and colleges a majority of institutions produce more co authored than single authored papers contacts with researchers from the same institution are still an important source of co authored papers even though slightly decreasing in frequency the determinants of co authorship outside the own institution are tested in a gravity model and it is found that distance and other geographical variables do not matter however the quality of co authors institutions measured by rankings of institutions has a significant impact on the number of co authored papers in top economics journals

formulating research policy on expert advice abstract national research assessments represent the principal policy used by countries with public university systems to improve the quality of their universities research they typically employ expert panels of local academics to assess journal quality and use such assessments to reward publications we propose a model of how experts assess quality and test this model using data from the recent australian assessment controlling for objective quality we show that experts cognitive biases dominate their assessments consequently such assessments exaggerate the quality of the experts research and understate that of their colleagues our model can explain 95 of the variation in assessments

the continuing search for relevance in agricultural economics agricultural economists have published thought provoking papers on the problems of the land grant system lgs in general as well as discussions of how agricultural economists can adjust resident teaching research and outreach programs to provide more relevant educational materials for society some of the recommendations presented must be implemented by individual universities government agencies institutes research groups or businesses others can be implemented by the american agricultural economics association aaea the association has responded to some of these ideas adjusting the composition of the program at the annual meeting and providing some additional services to members given the demand

what are the top five journals in economics a new meta ranking abstractwe construct a meta ranking of 277 economics journals based on 22 different rankings the ranking incorporates bibliometric indicators from four different databases web of science scopus google scholar and repec we account for the different scaling of the bibliometric indicators by standardizing each ranking score we run a principal component analysis to assign weights to each ranking in our meta ranking the top five journals are given by quarterly journal of economics journal of financial economics journal of economic literature jel journal of finance and econometrica additionally leaving out the jel as a survey journal and the finance journals in our top 10 list we confirm the perceived top five journals in the economics profession

rankings methodology for international comparisons of institutions and individuals an application to economics in australia and new zealand abstract the objectives of this paper are threefold first we critically survey and analyse the different methodologies that have been adopted in the rankings literature second using journal articles included in the econlit database and on the basis of two criteria one based on citations and the other on perceptions of journal quality we rank economics teaching departments in australia and new zealand for 1988 2002 and 1996 2002 and for individual academic economists for the periods 1988 2002 1988 1995 and 1996 2002 furthermore we identify individual star performers and recognize them in a designated hall of fame for 1988 2002 third our methodology enables us to make international comparisons on total and per capita bases previous multi country ranking studies in economics do not rank economics departments they provide rankings based on total publications in economics in universities regardless of whether the economists are in the economics departments or in other departments thus no rankings on per capita bases are provided we correct this shortcoming by providing total and per capita rankings and analysing the correlations between total and per capita rankings this is the first study to examine whether the size of the economics department matters with regard to productivity

aging and productivity among economists economists productivity over their careers and as measured by publication in leading journals declines very sharply with age there is no difference by age in the probability that an article submitted to a leading journal will be accepted rates of declining productivity are no greater among the very top publishers than among others and the probability of acceptance is increasingly related to the author s quality rather than the author s age

can credit spreads help predict a yield curve in this paper we investigate whether information in credit spreads helps improve the forecasts of government bond yields to do this we propose and estimate a joint dynamic nelson siegel dns model of the u s treasury yield curve and the credit spread curve the model accounts for the possibility of regime changes in yield curve dynamics and incorporates a zero lower bound constraint on yields we show that our joint model produces more accurate out of sample density forecasts of bond yields than does the yield only dns model in addition we demonstrate that incorporating regime changes and a zero lower bound constraint is essential for forecast improvements

measuring national economic performance without using prices abstract recent years have seen increasing awareness of the deficiencies of conventionally defined national income as a measure of a nation s overall economic performance alternative measures have been proposed involving either the modification of national income accounting conventions or the abandonment of national income itself in favour of something such as the genuine progress indicator gpi however such alternatives like national income itself all involve the use of monetary valuation for aggregation this paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of national economic performance which follows naturally from ecological economics as the study of economic activity rooted in a proper appreciation of its material circumstances and which does not involve using prices for aggregation the paper gives some results for three variants of the new approach and compares and discusses them while this new approach does not purport to provide a single definitive assessment of the sustainability of current economic activity which is an infeasible goal it could provide useful inputs to relevant research activity and to policy analysis and debate

the search for economics talent doctoral completion and research productivity economists hold an annual talent search in which students from around the world apply to doctoral programs and economics departments top economics phd programs seek candidates with the preparation aptitude drive and creativity to become academic professionals whose research will advance the frontiers of the discipline admission committee members must judge students potential economic talent based on the evidence provided in the application folders which includes standardized test scores course selection and grades quality of the undergraduate institution fellow economists evaluations and other relevant information due to the nonobservability of important characteristics the admission committee s task of matching opportunity with talent constitutes a signaling problem as modeled by michael a spence 1973 what information then credibly signals otherwise unobservable economics talent viewing quantitative graduate record examination gre scores as a proxy for ability ronald g ehrenberg and panagiotis g mavros 1995 found that these scores failed to predict phd completion or time to degree for 25 years of economics phd students at cornell university attributing that result to a poor proxy for ability they recommended obtaining a richer set of information about a student s true ability by using for example the quality of applicants undergraduate institution information from letters of recommendation and the graduate committee s ranking the search for economics talent doctoral completion and research productivity

valuation of ecosystem goods and services part 1 an integrated dynamic approach abstract this is the first part of a two part paper which offers a new approach to the valuation of ecosystem goods and services the existing literature on environmental valuation is based on two distinct foundations the ecological valuation methods derive values by a cost of production approach their common characteristic is the neglect of consumer preferences the economic valuation methods focus on the exchange value of ecosystem services their common characteristic is that they are finally based on consumer preferences and do not adequately take account of the complex internal structure of ecosystems as the existing methods for the valuation of ecosystem services emphasize either the economic system or the ecosystem the main objective of part 1 is to provide the conceptual foundations for a new method of valuation of ecosystem services which deals simultaneously with the ecosystem the economic system and society in a balanced way within a simple pre industrial model it is shown how the interdependencies between the three subsystems influence values and how values change over time

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

a revisionist perspective of european research in economics abstract the study by kalaitzidakis et al eur econom rev 113 1999a 1150 1168 hereafter kms continues to exert significant influence on the literature that evaluates the relative publication performance of european centres of research in economics the current paper argues that the methodology employed by kms is deficient and that it is not the methodology these authors intended to employ i utilise an improved approach to revise the original rankings that relied on publication output from 1991 to 1996 and to update the relevant findings using 1997 2002 data the revised rankings differ greatly from those reported by kms the results also suggest that there have been dramatic shifts in the relative ranking of the various european institutions over time as expected rankings are sensitive to the choice of journals considered however ranking sensitivity is considerably more pronounced with respect to changes in individual performance over time than to the group of journals used to measure performance

a biophysical analysis of the energy real gdp ratio implications for substitution and technical change abstract this paper quantifies the factors that caused the energy real gdp ratio to change during the post war period in france the federal republic of germany japan and the united kingdom econometric results indicate that changes in the types of fuel used changes in the energy consumed by the household sector changes in the types of goods and services produced and changes in energy prices account for most of the variation in this ratio price elasticities estimated from these results are lower than those estimated by neoclassical economists and indicate that the system boundaries used by neoclassical economists overestimate the amount of energy saved by substitution analysis of the error term from the regression results indicates that energy saving technical change has had little effect on the amount of energy used to support economic activity

on the robustness of alternative rankings methodologies australian and new zealand economics departments 1988 to 2002 just as friendly arguments based on an ignorance of facts eventually led to the creation of the definitive guinness book of world records any argument about university rankings has seemingly been a problem without a solution to state the obvious alternative rankings methodologies can and do lead to different rankings this article evaluates the robustness of rankings of australian and new zealand economics teaching departments for 1988 to 2002 and 1996 to 2002 using alternative rankings methodologies and compares the results with the rankings obtained by macri and sinha 2006 in the overall mean rankings for both 1988 to 2006 and 1996 to 2002 the university of melbourne is ranked first followed by uwa and anu

on the use of ecological prices and system wide indicators derived therefrom to quantify man s impact on the ecosystem abstract ecological prices and other system wide quantitative descriptors of ecosystem functioning are derived from the assumption that ecosystems allocate available resources efficiently among their components however ecological prices are not efficiency prices only and using them does not require one to assume that the ecosystem is completely controlled by man the same prices balance flows of different biomasses in a multicomponent system as such they play the role of exchange prices in a decentralized ecosystem properly defined with the help of ecological prices the resulting ecosystem productivity is no less a significant indicator of ecosystem functioning than the national product is significant for assessing the functioning of an economy considerations of the values taken simultaneously by our proposed indicators and by their economic analogs are of much help in judging the desirability of projects with relatively mild environmental repercussions these values are obtained from an integrated model of a system in which ecological and economic activities are intertwined however for the indicators to have an analytical meaning the methodology should be applied to trace only those dynamic paths during which the system possesses unique state dependent intensive properties in other cases a more comprehensive methodology one which also pays due regard to the viability of the ecosystem must supplement the analytical approach this rather comprehensive methodology is scale dependent and probabilistic in nature while delineating relations between the structure of the system and its behavior this method implies that efficiency and viability are two complementary rather than two commensurate attributes of a single entity an outside observer may be guided by his own values in his attempts to weigh these features but no inherent property of the system exists that supports his values unequivocally nevertheless this paper proposes an approximation to overcome this difficulty and to estimate a quantitative limit to the rate of substitution between productivity and viability such a limit is also an intensive property of the simulated system and the estimation of its value is shown to be crucial for studying the vulnerability of real ecosystems to severe man made disturbances

carbon weighted economic development performance and driving force analysis evidence from china based on a data envelopment analysis framework this study develops an indicator termed as carbon weighted economic development cwed covering the dimensions of energy environment economy and resources to measure the economic development performance in a carbon emission conscious economy as an empirical application the proposed approach is applied to a case study of 30 provinces in china in addition to identify the driving forces underlying low carbon economic development in china we analyze the endogenous interactions and dynamic behaviors between cwed foreign direct investment foreign trade industrial structure local fiscal expenditure and energy consumption structure using a panel vector auto regression model the main findings show that 1 adjusting industrial structure by vigorously developing the service industry and reducing the coal energy share in the primary energy consumption structure are the two most effective approaches to improve cwed in both the short run and long run in return cwed has positive feedback effects on both approaches in the long run 2 increase of the fiscal expenditure has a short term positive effect on cwed 3 fdi has an indirect negative effect on cwed in the long run and foreign trade has an indirect positive effect on cwed in the short term

evolving standards for academic publishing a q r theory this paper develops models of quality standards to examine two trends academic journals increasingly require extensive revisions of submissions and articles are becoming longer and changing in other ways papers are modeled as varying along two quality dimensions q reflects the importance of the main ideas and r other aspects of quality observed trends are regarded as increases in r quality a static equilibrium model illustrates comparative statics explanations a dynamic model in which referees with a biased view of their own work learn social norms for weighting q and r is shown to produce a long gradual evolution of social norms

ranking economics journals economics departments and economists using teaching focused research productivity author affiliation melody lo college of business university of texas at san antonio san antonio tx 78249 usa melody lo utsa edumc sunny wong department of economics university of san francisco san francisco ca 94117 usa mwong11 usfca edufranklin g mixon jr department of economics auburn university auburn al 36849 usa fmixon comcast net corresponding author acknowledgment the authors thank two anonymous referees of this journal john pepper and charles sawyer for helpful comments we thank helen au yeung subhashish sengupta and augustina pesci gonzalez for collecting the data used in this study the usual caveat applies 1 introductionprevious studies have accurately asserted that rankings of economists research output and economics departments can be just as important to academic economists as the espn football poll is to college football coaches gibbons and fish 1991 mixon and upadhyaya 2001 as a result of this importance economists have produced a substantial amount of research on individual department and journal rankings over the past 30 years much of this literature stream has examined the productivity of traditional forms of economics research in order to rank economists and institutions this study constructs new rankings of economics journals economics departments and economists that are based on i a tabulation of citations to economic education articles published in the economics literature since 1991 and ii a tabulation of the number of economic education articles and pages published since 1991 1 given this methodology our ranking emphasizes teaching focused research thus our construct offers an interesting alternative to economics journal department and faculty rankings that is based on the productivity of traditional types of economics research 2 journal ranking methodology and resultsto construct our teaching focused research ranking of economics journals departments and faculty we examined published articles that list one or more of the economic education classification codes from the journal of economic literature hereafter jel a200 a290 the jel redefined its classification codes for indexing economics research in 1991 so our ranking construct includes all jel classified journal articles in economic education from 1991 through april 2005 overall there are 1535 articles within our time frame table 1 lists the top 20 economics journals with regard to the quantity of production of economic education research of course some journals specialize in this area of economics research e g journal of economic education jee while others publish only an occasional piece in the genre e g economic inquiry ei thus the ranking in table 1 reflects this element at the top of the list with 429 articles since 1991 is the jee the american economic review aer is ranked fifth 54 articles while the journal of economic perspectives jep is 13th 24 articles a few well known regional associations general journals are also in the top 20 among these are the southern economic journal sej in seventh place 34 articles and ei in 16th place 16 articles table 1 teaching focused research productivity based on numbers of articles published top 20 economics journals table omitted see article image to account for the relative importance of economics journals in the field of economic education we first tabulate the number of economic education articles that are contained in the social sciences citation index ssci for each journal a total of 831 of the 1535 articles published since 1991 that list the jel codes for economic education are contained in the ssci next we identified the importance of journals in the field of economic education by examining total citations as well as total citations per article received by a journal s economic education articles published since 1991

looking for a guide to protect the environment the development of the precautionary principle abstract if the precautionary principle is to become the guide of the international community for environmental protection policies an economic interpretation of the principle is in order the analysis of case studies and a survey of the recent decision theoretic literature show the lack of a fully satisfactory economic model more generally various theoretical and empirical results show that the principle cannot be assumed to apply a priori though it has been proposed by international treaties as a rule of thumb for situations of scientific uncertainty the precautionary principle could actually be inefficient

commensuration and theories of value in ecological economics abstract without a theory of value price in ecological economics the valuation of ecosystem and economic resources cannot be rigorously defended at the crux of the matter is the valuation or mixed units problem of commensurating biophysical inputs outputs which are different this paper critically reviews candidate theories of value which have emerged in the ecological economics literature for dealing with this problem first of all the neo ricardian approach using sraffa type systems is discussed in particular judson s assertion that the sraffa system is suitable for ecological economics is questioned as it is based on circular flow generation of a surplus and exchange values none of these ideas are consistent with a biophysical characterisation of an economic system which is paramount in ecological economics a more fruitful avenue for establishing a biophysical theory of value based on ecological and thermodynamic principles is to extend patterson s quality equivalent methodology qem to explicitly include mass flows in addition to energy at this point a model close to costanza and hannon s biosphere model of price determination emerges the extended qem model however has a number of important advantages over the costanza hannon model because it has a more generalised formulation and is not reliant on necessarily using solar energy as the numeraire the paper concludes with a discussion of some outstanding issues that need to be resolved before a biophysical theory of value can be properly established in ecological economics

environmental valuation to use or not to use a comparative study of the united states and europe valuation methods have been used for five main purposes in environmental decision making cost benefit analysis cba of projects cba of new regulations natural resource damage assessment environmental costing and environmental accounting the relatively lower importance attached to economic efficiency in environmental decision making in most european countries compared to the u s a both legally and in practice might account for our general finding that there are very few valuation studies in europe which have served as a decisive basis for environmental policy and regulations however with eu s goal to establish environmentally adjusted national accounts and to apply cba to environmental policy and regulations time seems ripe for an increased use of valuation techniques in europe

ecosystem service value assessment for constructed wetlands a case study in hangzhou china abstract based on a comprehensive analysis of various classifications of natural resource values we summarized an ecological economic value system of constructed wetland cw ecosystems for treating eutrophic water using the cw located at the hangzhou botanical garden as an example the contingent valuation method cvm and shadow project approach spa were applied to estimate the economic values of cw system ecosystem services the cvm estimated a value of 800 000 yuan yuan chinese currency 7 6 yuan 1 usd as of august 2007 as the total economic value of the cw in a twenty year period meanwhile the spa calculated a value of 23 04 million yuan as the total economic value of the cw in a twenty year period it is determined that compared to the cvm the spa provides a more approximate value of the true monetary value of the hangzhou botanical garden cw this study could fill the gap of knowledge and provide a benchmark when evaluating constructed ecosystem services and help policy makers to promote the development of constructed wetlands in china

are overall journal rankings a good mapping for article quality in specialty fields overall journal rankings which are generated with sample articles in different research fields are commonly used to measure the research productivity of academic economists in this article we investigate a growing concern in the profession that the use of the overall journal rankings to evaluate scholars relative research productivity may exhibit a downward bias toward researchers in some specialty fields if their respective field journals are under ranked in the overall journals rankings to address this concern we constructed new journal rankings based on the intellectual influence of research in 8 specialty fields using a sample consisting of 26 401 articles published across 60 economics journals from 1998 to 2007 we made various comparisons between the newly constructed journal rankings in specialty fields and the traditional overall journal ranking our results show that the overall journal ranking provides a considerably good mapping for the article quality in specialty fields supplementary

the journals of economics we examine the principal journals of economics with particular attention to the communication between journals as reflected by the network of interjournal citations during 1987 90 and the changes over the past century in the characteristics of the authors and the techniques they have used the numerical results and those of the statistical modeling of these results reinforce the importance of economic theory as an exporter of intellectual influence to applied economics the study includes an examination of the degree of specialization among different subfields of economics a statistical model is presented for measuring the flow of intellectual influence as measured by citations in terms of simple univariate scores

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

an updated ranking of academic journals in economics we conduct an update of the ranking of economic journals by kalaitzidakis mamuneas and stengos 2003 however our present study differs methodologically from that earlier study in an important dimension we use a rolling window of years between 2003 and 2008 for each year counting the number of citations of articles published in the previous ten years this allows us to obtain a smoother longer view of the evolution of rankings in the period under consideration and avoid the inherent randomness that may exist at any particular year using this framework we proceed to examine the relative ranking of the canadian journal of economics over time we find the canadian journal managed not only to maintain its relative position but to also improve it over time

uncertainty measures for economics journal impact factors academic economists appear to be intensely interested in rankings of journals institutions and individuals yet there is little discussion of the uncertainty associated with these rankings to illustrate the uncertainty associated with citations based rankings i compute the standard error of the impact factor for all economics journals with a five year impact factor in the 2011 journal citations report i use these to derive confidence intervals for the impact factors as well as ranges of possible rank for a subset of thirty journals i find that the impact factors of the top two journals are well defined and set these journals apart in a clearly defined group an elite group of 9 11 mainstream journals can also be fairly reliably distinguished the four bottom ranked journals are also fairly clearly set apart for the remainder of the distribution confidence intervals overlap and rankings are quite uncertain jel a14

does nnp growth indicate welfare improvement abstract we show that instantaneous increases in real nnp over time are an accurate indicator of true dynamic welfare improvements this highlights a connection between the theory of green or comprehensive national income accounting and the theory of real price indices

the impact of economics on management abstract this article analyzes the impact of economics on management by examining citations of 71 management journals aer jpe econometrica and qje have the highest impact industrial organization journals also have a particularly large impact the share of economics in management citations drops from 9 91 percent until 1995 to 5 70 percent for 1996 2005 three possible explanations for this decrease are analyzed economics research became more mathematical because management is a younger discipline it grew faster than economics in quantity and quality of research and interdisciplinary spillover of research is slower than the spillover within a discipline only the second explanation is supported by the data

green accounting and economic policy abstract through the lens of conventional national accounting resource depletion and natural environment degradation often appear misleadingly as desirable economic growth the old system of national accounts sna has been revised and a set of environmental satellite accounts proposed certain weaknesses however pervade the new proposals the conventional measurements remain largely unaltered and the satellite accounts are of unclear purpose and unnecessarily complex as proposed they rely on the valuation of environmental stocks while the economically more important flow accounts to their detriment are to be derived indirectly from changes in stock values the sna the paper stresses is primarily an economic framework incapable of capturing all environmental change and the national accounts are far more useful economically than environmentally greening the accounts would be optional for most affluent countries whose overriding environmental concern is pollution this can be addressed directly through taxation and regulation pollution information in satellite accounts can indeed be valuable but revised and fully integrated resource accounting is a priority concern for those developing countries that are running down natural resources and for which conventional accounting distorts macroeconomic measurement analysis and policy the paper argues that green accounting can only ensure income sometimes called weak sustainability which should be considered as a step leading ultimately to an ecological or stronger sustainability

fishes ponds and productivity student advisor matching and early career publishing success for economics phds i introduction research productivity is an important concern for members of the academe publishing success is important for individual departments because more productive faculty increases the department s research profile which in turn increases the department s professional reputation as evidence thursby 2000 and ehrenberg and hurst 1998 find that a department s reputation in the national research council nrc ratings increases with published research while smyth 1999 finds that pages published in the top 5 journals have a greater impact than pages published in other journals publishing success is important for individual faculty members because peer reviewed publications have long been shown to be economic currency for academic economists bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 moore newman and turnbull 1998 sauer 1988 among others research promise is important for graduate students because students with the greatest promise for productive careers are likely to receive the best initial job placements buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 krueger and wu 2000 long 1978 indeed according to a survey of hiring departments carson and navarro 1988 every single top 20 domestic economics program considered the quality of one s research agenda to be of moderate to great importance in the hiring decision an important question then is how to identify which factors are associated with the likelihood of having a more productive research career to date empirical studies have focused on the program from which the student graduated recent examples include collins cox and stango 2000 davis huston and patterson 2001 stock and alston 2000 this focus implicitly assumes that because only the very best students become enrolled in elite programs graduates of highly ranked programs should hold the greatest promise for publishing success 1 in support coupe 2001 and buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that students graduating from top programs are more likely to publish in core economics journals while hogan 1981 finds that students graduating from programs with more active faculty publish more journal articles before placing total faith in these results however members of the academe should ask whether such findings hold across all points in the graduate distribution or whether they are only accurate predictors on average previously published data clearly suggest the latter for instance buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that 30 of tier 1 graduates do not publish any academic articles within the first 9 yr after phd receipt while 50 do not publish any top 50 articles as defined by liebowitz and palmer 1984 in other words there is a large amount of unexplained variability in the future success of a program s graduates krueger and wu 2000 93 consequently it is likely that significant overlap exists between the performance of top program graduates and lesser program graduates with significant portions of the latter outperforming significant portions of the former with this in mind the question becomes is there a readily observable factor that is a less noisy predictor of a student s likelihood for publishing success we argue that there is during a student s postgraduate education one of the most significant influences is his or her dissertation advisor we posit that for timing reasons advisors will possess additional insight into a student s true research potential that was not available to the admission committee when deciding whether to admit the student into the program consequently we expect a student s dissertation advisor to be a more informed predictor of his or her early career productivity than the program from which he or she receives the phd 2 in other words we believe that considering the identity of a student s dissertation advisor in addition to the quality of the program from which the student receives the phd should help reduce the uncertainty inherent in predicting the student s position within the early career productivity distribution

european economics an analysis based on publications in the core journals abstract in this paper we provide a ranking of european economics institutions and countries based on publications in a core set of 10 economic journals from 1991 to 1996 we find that the three leading universities in europe are the london school of economics tel aviv university and oxford university while the three top ranked countries are the u k france and israel

ranking economics departments worldwide on the basis of phd placement an objective ranking of economics departments worldwide in terms of graduate education is derived the central idea is that the value of a department is the sum of the values of its phd graduates as reflected in the values of their current employing departments the scores are thus derived as solutions to a linear system of simultaneous equations in the values the sample includes the top fifty four departments the composition of which is determined endogenously using a criterion requiring a minimum of four placements in the departments comprising the sample two other related rankings are proposed which place more emphasis on more recent faculty recruitments the results point to a very high concentration in the economics phd education market worldwide confirming the dominance of the top u s departments in particular of harvard and m i t nevertheless a modest de concentration trend is under way the rankings are in close agreement with the 1994 national research council survey ranking based on the perceived quality of phd programs

evolution of social norms with heterogeneous preferences a general model and an application to the academic review process abstract the article presents a model of social norm evolution that suggests how the increase in optimal and actual first response times frt of economics journals can be related when the optimal frt and the norm about how much time refereeing should take increase it seems that the existence of a norm increases the average refereeing time the model suggests the surprising result that this is not necessarily true i also discuss applications of the model in other contexts differences in the optimal frt between disciplines the effects of the frt on the tenure process and strategic behavior of referees

the allocation of talent over the business cycle and its long term effect on sectoral productivity it is well documented that graduates enter different occupations in recessions than in booms in our paper we examine the impact of the resulting change in the allocation of talent for long term productivity and output in a sector in a setting where output can be quantitatively and qualitatively measured we find evidence that talent flows to stable sectors in recessions and to cyclical sectors in booms economists starting or graduating from their phd in a recession are significantly more productive in academia over the long term than economists starting or graduating in a boom

the role of thermodynamics in the study of economic and ecological systems abstract economic theory has always maintained that economic value is generated solely within the economy where it is fully distributed among the factors of production before being consumed according to this theory the economy is an isolated system that does not need flows to pass across its boundaries in support of its steady state general equilibrium from a thermodynamic point of view this idea is unacceptable according to thermodynamic theory any open system which allows flows of matter and energy to cross its boundaries is capable of maintaining itself in steady state only because it transport value from its environment to restore the value that has been consumed within the system and dissipated drawing on the analogy with thermodynamics this paper replaces the traditional systemic analog of the economy which is the closed circular flow process with the steady flow process according to this analog any efficient economy is an open system both physically and economically requiring a flow of economic value to maintain its steady state in other words an economically isolated system has to be inefficient and is bound to misallocate and overuse environmental resources whether the economy behaves as an economically isolated inefficient or open efficient system is an empirical question however if real economies are economically open and efficient and environmental resources are abused due to the economy s unrestrained material growth parts of traditional economic theory espicially those related to benefit evaluation will have to be modified policy recommendations will be affected in any case because internalization the panacea of resource misallocations cannot be more than a temporary solution instead of opening the economy internalization encloses the harmed resource and saves it by abusing excessively other environmental resources

women in economics moving up or falling off the academic career ladder copyright 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 by the american economic association

unraveling the academic productivity of economists the opportunity costs of teaching and service this study investigates the relationships among research productivity teaching and service on the basis of individual specific information involving approximately 715 academic economists responding to an online survey these economists provided information regarding their teaching and service commitments as well as personal and institutional information the publication record of each respondent was then obtained from econlit together these data constitute a rich field for the systematic study of research productivity results of a tobit analysis reveal much about the nature of research productivity underscoring for instance the importance of gender coauthorship presen tations at conferences and peers who publish among the more important findings from this analysis is that both teaching and service commitments have a significantly negative impact on the research productivity of academic economists these relations hold across types of academic employer though to varying degrees taken together the results provide interesting insights into the roles of academic scholars teachers and colleagues

journals preferences and publishing in agricultural and environmental economics research quality is an increasingly important metric for determining funding allocations promotion and tenure and professional prestige a key metric often used as a proxy for research quality is the ranking of the journal in which a manuscript appears while citation based measures of journal quality are commonly used less is known about other dimensions of journal quality and prestige we report results from an international study using best worst scaling to investigate researchers journal preferences respondents used two criteria to assess journals the impact a paper in the journal would have on career progression and the impact beyond academia of papers in the journal among the sample of journals studied the american journal of agricultural economics is ranked at the top for career progression for the aggregate sample while science was rated at the top for broader impact we find no significant correlation between the journal scores based on the two criteria nor between them and the journals impact factors these results suggest that impact beyond academia is poorly aligned with career incentives and that citation measures reflect poorly if at all peers esteem of journals heteroscedastic scale adjusted latent class models reveal marked heterogeneity in journal preferences related to researchers institutional affiliation and geographic region we find significant differences in error variance over people and choices people were less consistent when choosing their least as opposed to their most preferred journal this finding has broader implications given the burgeoning use of best worst surveys

the effects of competition and equal treatment laws on gender wage differentials discrimination if it is inefficient can be eliminated by competition in most countries it is also forbidden by law this paper evaluates the influence of economic and legal factors on the portion of male female wage differentials that is not explained by other worker characteristics and may be due to discrimination we use a new international data set of suitable gender wage gap measures constructed from the results of existing studies meta analysis of the data shows that increased competition and adoption of international conventions concerning equal treatment laws both reduce gender wage gaps while legislation that prevents women from performing strenuous or dangerous jobs tends to increase it doris weichselbaumer and rudolf winter ebmer

ranking economics departments in europe a statistical approach we provide a ranking of economics departments in europe and we discuss the methods used to obtain it the jel cd rom serves as a database for a period covering 10 years journals are ranked using a combination of expert opinions and citation data to produce a scale from 1 to 10 the publication output and habits of fifteen european countries plus california are then compared individuals with a contribution greater than a predetermined minimum level are regrouped into departments which are ranked according to their total scores a standard deviation is provided to underline the uncertainty of this ranking

general interest versus specialty journals using intellectual influence of econometrics research to rank economics journals and articles this paper demonstrates the potential problem in using existing economics journal rankings to evaluate the research productivity of scholars by constructing a new ranking of economics journals and articles based on 2142 econometrics sample articles published from 2000 to 2005 our ranking results show that the intellectual influence of an econometrics article published in several econometrics statistics journals is much higher than if it were published in the most prestigious general interest journal given that a study s potential influence is integrated into the submission decision this suggests a substantial downward bias toward econometricians when existing rankings are used to evaluate their research productivity copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

revealed performances worldwide rankings of economists and economics departments 1990 2000 in this paper i study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications these rankings reveal a dominant position of the united states in the production of economics literature over time however the extent of this dominance is decreasing jel a10 a14

economic and ecological concepts for valuing ecosystem services abstract the purpose of this special issue is to elucidate concepts of value and methods of valuation that will assist in guiding human decisions vis a vis ecosystems the concept of ecosystem service value can be a useful guide when distinguishing and measuring where trade offs between society and the rest of nature are possible and where they can be made to enhance human welfare in a sustainable manner while win win opportunities for human activities within the environment may exist they also appear to be increasingly scarce in a full global ecological economic system this makes valuation all the more essential for guiding future human activity this paper provides some history background and context for many of the issues addressed by the remaining papers in this special issue its purpose is to place both economic and ecological meanings of value and their respective valuation methods in a comparative context highlighting strengths weakness and addressing questions that arise from their integration

the relative impacts of economics journals 1970 1990 our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by john p sophocleus mark gwartney michele butler and scott ralston we received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from jon brunson and edward novak constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers financial supportfrom the faculty development committee at salisbury state university is gratefully acknowledged

leading institutional contributors to the elite economic journals given the prestige enjoyed by several economic departments there is a natural curiosity regarding their contributions to the economic literature this article analyses the appearance of all academic institutions worldwide in the eight leading economic journals the blue ribbon eight from 1991 to 2005 we cite those institutions who appear the most and analyse the composition of appearances across all eight journals to assess their degree of diversity while it is tempting to use these measures as a ranking of institutions the analysis is meant to be purely an historical appreciation of the contributions of these admirable institutions

an examination of the reliability of prestigious scholarly journals evidence and implications for decision makers in universities all over the world hiring and promotion committees regularly hear the argument this is important work because it is about to appear in prestigious journal x moreover those who allocate levels of research funding such as in the multi billion pound research assessment exercise in uk universities often come under pressure to assess research quality in a mechanical way by using journal prestige ratings this paper s results suggest that such tendencies are dangerous it uses total citations over a quarter of a century as the criterion the paper finds that it is far better to publish the best article in an issue of a medium quality journal like the oxford bulletin of economics and statistics than to publish the worst article or often the worst 4 articles in an issue of a top journal like the american economic review implications are discussed

the institutional concentration of authors in top journals of economics during the last two decades this paper addresses the institutional concentration of authors in 15 top economics journals from 1977 to 1997 the concentration of authors phd affiliations is substantially higher than the concentration of authors current affiliations relating input indicators such as population number of universities with economics departments or manpower in economics to publication output reduces the us dominance considerably whereas israel and the united kingdom come out excellently exporters and importers of phds among universities are identified concentration ratios like the herfindahl index lack a clear time trend nevertheless the position of the united states has been weakening in recent years

the slowdown of the economics publishing process over the last three decades there has been a dramatic slowdown of the publication process at top economics journals a substantial part is due to journals requiring more extensive revisions various explanations are considered democratization of the review process increases in the complexity of papers growth of the profession and cost and benefit arguments changes in the profession are examined using time series data connections between these changes and the slowdown are examined using paper level data there is evidence for some explanations but most of the slowdown remains unexplained changes may reflect evolving social norms

measures of energy cost and value in ecosystems the physical output of ecological processes have different values even though they may be measured in the same physical units using linear input output theory we derive a set of weights based on direct and indirect energy requirements for ecosystem commodities which uniquely converts them into commensurable unit costs under certain conditions these costs are equal to values or prices using this system behavioral theories can be better posed for experimental verification

subdiscipline specific journal rankings whither applied economics in light of widespread specialization of research and teaching it seems appropriate to supplement the existing general rankings of economics journals with subdisciplinespeci c rankings that is the primary objective of this paper the availability of subdiscipline speci c rankings also permits both i alternative journal ranking methods for the general discipline that account for the breadth of a journal s impact across specialized elds and ii estimation of the relative weights implicitly associated with each eld in traditional disciplinary journal rankings the results are robust to the exclusion of self citations

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

environmental and ecological economics a citation analysis this study looks at two distinct questions dwhat have been the most influential journal articles in environmental economics and ecological economics over the 10 year period 1994 2003 t and dhow much overlap is there between the fields of environmental and ecological economics t we examine the references in all articles published in jeem and ecological economics ee over this period for each of these two fields a list of the top articles and top journals cited by articles published in jeem and ee is presented we also present some results based on our study of the isi journal citation reports we find that there is a significant overlap between the two fields at the journal level the two journals cite similar journals there is a correlation of 0 34 between the number of citations received by the journals that are most cited and the correlation is even higher if journal self citation is excluded the main differences are that ecological economics tends to cite but not be cited by general natural science journals more often than environmental economics does environmental economics cites more heavily from journals rather than other publications and citations in environmental economics are more concentrated on particular journals and individual publications however there is much less similarity at the level of individual articles nonmarket valuation articles dominate the most cited articles in jeem while green accounting sustainability and the environmental kuznets curve are all prominent topics in ee d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the evolution of the scientific productivity of highly productive economists this paper studies the evolution of research productivity of a sample of economists working in the best 81 departments in the world in 2007 the main novelty is that in so far as a productivity distribution can be identified with an income distribution we measure productivity mobility in a dynamic context using an indicator inspired in an income mobility index suggested by fields 2010 for a two period world productivity is measured in terms of publications weighted by the citation impact of the journals where each article is published in the periodical literature we study the evolution of average productivity productivity inequality the extent of rank reversals and productivity mobility for seven cohorts as well as the population as a whole we offer new evidence confirming previous results about the heterogeneity of the evolution of productivity for top and other researchers however the major result is that contrary to what was expected for our sample of very highly productive scholars the effect of rank reversals between the two periods on overall productivity mobility offsets the effect of an increase in productivity inequality from the first to the second period in the youngest five out of seven cohorts jel a11 a12 b41 d63 i32

regime shifts in a dynamic term structure model of u s treasury bond yields this article develops and empirically implements an arbitrage free dynamic term structure model with priced factor and regime shift risks the risk factors are assumed to follow a discrete time gaussian process and regime shifts are governed by a discrete time markov process with state dependent transition probabilities this model gives closed form solutions for zero coupon bond prices an analytic representation of the likelihood function for bond yields and a natural decomposition of expected excess returns to components corresponding to regime shift and factor risks using monthly data on u s treasury zero coupon bond yields we show a critical role of priced state dependent regime shift risks in capturing the time variations in expected excess returns and document notable differences in the behaviors of the factor risk component of the expected returns across high and low volatility regimes additionally the state dependence of the regime switching probabilities is shown to capture an interesting asymmetry in the cyclical behavior of interest rates the shapes of the term structure of volatility of bond yield changes are also very different across regimes with the well known hump being largely a low volatility regime phenomenon jel g12 this article develops and empirically implements an arbitrage free dynamic term structure model dtsm with priced factor and regimeshift risks the risk factors are assumed to follow a discrete time gaussian process and regime shifts are governed by a discrete time markov process with state dependent transition probabilities agents are assumed to know both the current state of the economy and the regime they are currently in this leads to regime dependent risk neutral pricing and an equilibrium term structure that reflects the risks of both changes in the state and shifts in regimes

a re examination of the predictability of economic activity using the yield spread this paper revisits the yield spread s usefulness for predicting future real gdp growth we show that the contribution of the spread can be decomposed into the effect of expected future changes in short rates and the effect of the term premium we find that both factors are relevant for predicting real gdp growth but the respective contributions differ we investigate whether the cyclical behavior of interest rate volatility could account for either or both effects we find that while volatility displays important correlations with both the term structure of interest rates and gdp it does not appear to account for the yield spread s usefulness for predicting gdp growth

degradacao ambiental e teoria economica algumas reflexoes sobre uma economia dos ecossistemas there are few consistent theoretical reflections on the suitability of economic instruments per se in facing the issue of natural capital degradation this paper presents some considerations about the relationship between environmental degradation and economic theory in a critical perspective the guiding assumption of the arguments is that the treatment given so far to the environment is largely reductionist which must necessarily be overcome by a transdisciplinary approach the sequencing of the ideas outlined converges to the need of building this new framework referred to here as economics of ecosystems

electoral competition and special interest politics have fixed positions on some issues but vary their positions on others in order to attract votes and campaign contributions in this context we examine whether special interest groups are governed by an electoral motive or an influence in their campaign giving and how their contributions affect the equilibrium platforms we show that each party is induced to behave as if it were maximizing a weighted sum of the aggregate welfares of informed voters and members of special interest groups the party that is expected to win a majority of seats caters more to the special interests

is there value added from the review process in economics preliminary evidence from authors do referees employed by journals merely screen acceptable from unacceptable manuscripts or are they charged with an additional value adding responsibility vis a vis the papers they review drawing from editorial correspondence provided by survey respondents i address this question by examining the relationship between citations of published papers and comments provided by reviewers and editors referees comments demonstrate a positive impact on subsequent citation of papers while comments made by editors show no such impact value adding by editors appears to derive principally from efficient matching of papers with reviewers

ecological production based pricing of biosphere processes abstract ecological pricing theory and method is reviewed and then applied to the valuation of biosphere processes and services ecological pricing values biosphere processes on the basis of biophysical interdependencies between all parts of the ecosystem not just those that have direct or obvious value to humans the application of the ecological pricing method to the biosphere for 1994 indicates that the total value of primary ecological inputs services to be nearly us 25 trillion this compares with us 33 trillion obtained in the costanza et al 1997 study our analysis also indicated a good correspondence between the shadow ecological price and the observed market price for all marketable goods except fossil fuel which was undervalued by the market

which journal rankings best explain academic salaries evidence from the university of california the ranking of an academic journal is important to authors universities journal publishers and research funders rankings are gaining prominence as countries adopt regular research assessment exercises that especially reward publication in high impact journals yet even within a rankings oriented discipline like economics there is no agreement on how aggressively lower ranked journals are down weighted and in how wide is the universe of journals considered moreover since it is typically less costly for authors to cite superfluous references whether of their own volition or prompted by editors than it is to ignore relevant ones rankings based on citations may be easily manipulated in contrast when the merits of publication in one journal or another are debated during hiring promotion and salary decisions the evaluators are choosing over actions with costly consequences we therefore look to the academic labor market using data on economists in the university of california system to relate their lifetime publications in 700 different academic journals to salary we test amongst various sets of journal rankings and publication discount rates to see which are most congruent with the returns implied by the academic labor market jel a14 i23 j44

citations or journal quality which is rewarded more in the academic labor market research quality can be evaluated from citations or from the prestige of journals publishing the research we relate salary of tenured university of california uc economists to their lifetime publications of 5 500 articles and to the 140 000 citations to these articles citations hardly affect salary especially in top ranked uc departments where impacts of citations are less than one tenth those of journals in lower ranked departments and when journal quality is less comprehensively measured effects of citations on salary increase if journal quality is just measured by counting articles in journal tiers apparent effects of citations are overstated jel a14 j44

a science driven market based instrument for determining the cost of environmental services a comparison of two catchments in australia abstract an auction based approach or mbi for market based instrument was used to purchase environmental services from landowners and to establish a long term economic resource forest plantations in two catchments in the state of victoria australia the policy goal of the mbi was to encourage the conversion of cleared land to forest plantations it was desired to achieve this while also reducing the amount of land affected by dryland salinity with minimum impact on water available for irrigation operationally interested landowners identified areas on which they would be willing to establish forest plantations and stated the amount of money they would require from the government to undertake plantation establishment this constituted a landowner bid the proposed planting area associated with each bid was processed through a quantitative hydrological model to estimate off site impacts on dryland salinity and the change in water yield resulting from the conversion of individual non forested areas to forest plantations landowner bids were then accepted or not based on the economic trade offs among dollars requested by a landowner reduction in water yield and decrease in dryland salinity to enable a comparison of costs the mbi was independently trialled in two catchments for both the cost to government of a hectare of plantation and or a hectare of salinity benefit was calculated a number of ways assuming the existence of a calibrated hydrological model costs associated with distributing money via such an mbi were publicity fieldwork processing the bids through the model probity legal and administration in the gippsland catchment the total cost to establish forest plantations was 5340 per ha whereas it was 1635 per ha in the corangamite catchment no salinity benefit was obtained in gippsland but in corangamite if considered in isolation of the economic forest plantation benefit the cost per hectare of salinity benefit was 5020 operational aspects of the mbi are presented and discussed and a comparison is made to the expected costs of a conventional non science driven approach to landowner incentives

core journals in economics gaines h liner this article ranks core journals in economics using the textbook citation method rankings are produced from citations in graduate level microeconomics macroeconomics and econometrics textbooks textbooks used in the study were chosen through responses from a survey of professors in top tier economics departments the top nine journals or core journals from this study correlate closely in rank with the results of two comparison studies second tier journals identified in this study correlate less closely in rank with second tier journals in comparison studies jel a i introduction between 1970 and 1990 the number of published pages in economics journals more than doubled laband and piette 1994 and during the early 1970s budgets of libraries devoted to journals grew in percentage terms several fold relative to those devoted to books liebowitz and palmer 1984 laband and piette 1994 reported that between 1976 and 1985 at least 55 new economics journals commenced publication although not all journals are considered general interest journals many emphasize the importance of economic theory in their submission instructions to authors with this increased emphasis on research scholars and administrators alike have acquired an increased sensitivity to how journals rank in quality influence or impact the variety of methods used to rank journals departments and authors attests to the increased concern individuals place on such issues the social sciences citation index ssci institute for scientific information 1986 has figured prominently as a source of data in a variety of studies burton and phimister 1995 laband and piette 1994 liebowitz and palmer 1984 and stigler et al 1995 provide recent examples another approach occasionally used in ranking of economics departments involves choosing citation data from the premier core or principal journals departmental rankings are then based on the number of journal articles or pages published by members of their faculty in these journals graves et al 1982 burkitt and baimbridge 1995 conroy et al 1995 scott and mitias 1996 and dusansky and vernon 1998 have used variations of this approach others have surveyed deans and chairpersons for their own rankings of journals see enomoto and ghosh 1993 for one recent example a potential weakness of this approach is that survey respondents can be influenced by recent and not so recent literature on the subject and by each other some earlier studies have attempted to rank journals by their quality see liebowitz and palmer 1984 for a review and beed and beed 1996 for a criticism of attempts to measure journal quality because an objective ranking of journals by their quality is difficult if not impossible most recent studies mentioned above have attempted to rank journals based on their impact or their influence ranking the number of citations to journal articles in other journal articles provides only one path to measuring the potential impact a journal has on individuals and the profession and ultimately the broader community davis 1998 pointed out that the often used ssci data under represent journals that share content with other social sciences a second problem noted is that not all of any journal s citations are identified by citing journal in every case the list is truncated and some portion of a journal s citations are simply entered as all other davis 1998 62 moreover the percentage of citations in the all other category is not necessarily the same from journal to journal this might bias raw counts of citations as well as attempts to adjust for impact by adjusting for the number of pages or the number of characters in the cited journals however these biases tend to have less impact on rankings of core journals than less highly ranked journals in attempts to rank authors of journal articles using ssci data alexander and mabry 1994 noted that the ssci does not include in the counts the second and subsequent authors of multiple author articles

ecosystem prices activity analysis applied to ecosystems abstract in this paper a method is developed to derive prices for natural goods from information about material and energy flows within ecosystems the derivation is based on an analogy between ecological and economic systems both systems are characterized by flows of material and energy to derive ecosystem prices the mathematical structure of koopman s economic linear production model his activity analysis is applied to a material flow model of ecosystems the ecological interpretation of these prices is discussed and the uniqueness of the price system is investigated an algorithm for price calculation is derived and demonstrated with a numerical example finally it is discussed whether ecosystem prices may be suitable as surrogates for economic valuations of natural goods

the market for academic journals library journal subscriptions are treated as a public good a monopoly publisher sells subscriptions to both libraries and individuals for individuals the journal is a private good profit maximization can lead to high institutional prices and few individual subscribers this outcome is reinforced by increases in publishing costs library serial prices fall if patrons pay access costs and or there is congestion data are presented to support these conclusions library prices are two to ten times higher than private prices there are as few as two to four individual subscribers in an academic journal market library subscription prices are directly related to the number of consumers who use the library serial

the influence of economics articles on business research analysis of journals and time trends this article examines the influence of economics on business research using citation data the share of economics in citations from business is 10 78 until 1995 but only 6 95 for 1996 2003 four potential explanations for this decline are discussed interdisciplinary spillover of research is slower than within a discipline the increasing use of mathematics in economics made economics less useful for business scholars economics articles are by their nature more long lived than business articles business has grown recently more quickly than economics the data support the second and fourth explanations different research spillover occurs but lasts no more than two years

how much influence do economics professors have on rankings the case of australia and new zealand this study ranks australian and new zealand economics teaching departments on the basis of the research productivity of its economics professors in economics teaching departments using quality adjusted journal articles listed on the econlit database for the periods 1988 to 2002 and for 1996 to 2002 the per capita research productivity of professors is highest for university of melbourne university of western australia and university of canterbury for a number of economics departments the per capita research productivity is lower than the research productivity of all faculty members using a number of criteria for 1988 2002 and 1996 2002 these universities are university of auckland royal melbourne institute of technology university griffith university and macquarie university

replication in empirical economics the journal of money credit and banking project this paper examines the role of replication in empirical economic research it presents the findings of a two year study that collected programs and data from authors and attempted to replicate their published results the research provides new and important information about the extent and causes of failures to replicate published results in economics the findings suggest that inadvertent errors in published empirical articles are a commonplace rather than a rare occurence copyright 1986 by american economic association

energy and depletable resources economics and policy 1973 1998 abstract this paper reviews the impact of the literature in depletable resources and energy economics over the period 1973 1998 particularly the initial period of publication of the journal of environmental economics and management 1974 1998 a discussion of prominent policy issues in this arena is provided along with an indication of what academic economics papers have contributed to that debate this is followed by a citation analysis of contributions in the fields of energy and exhaustible resource economics for each of these two fields a list of the top papers in each five year period from 1974 to 1998 is presented along with a list of the top journals in each decade based on average citations per article the top ten cited articles in the fields in the journal of environmental economics and management are also presented

does the academic labor market initially allocate new graduates efficiently it is not surprising that economics graduate students from elite and very good schools find better jobs after completion of their ph d degree on average than do candidates from less prestigious universities yet the job market outcome for candidates from the same university varies quite a lot while the top candidates from the elite schools are often able to find jobs in other elite universities it is unclear how average candidates from elite schools fare compared to the top students from relatively less prestigious schools and how the relative job market outcome relates to future success as a researcher the objective of this paper is to investigate these issues in this paper we compare the career trajectories of candidates coming from three different types of schools elite universities very good universities and good universities we define three types of graduates within each group those who placed best those who had an average placement and those who found jobs at lower levels then for each of these nine groups we look at initial and current affiliations and we compare publication patterns of the graduates more than a decade into their academic careers can we say that the initial allocation was efficient in the sense that those who placed higher were also more productive in research terms and to what extent does the labor market for economists adapt and allow economists to move between schools as the ability of individuals to publish their work manifests itself over time

assessing editorial preferences towards industrial organization articles in order to evaluate the relative importance of articles on industrial organization published in major generalist or specialized scientific journals this empirical study has used the new 1991 jel classification system by regrouping contributions according to the type of article theoretical analysis industrial policy or industry studies a rate of multiple reference index has been introduced to examine the degree of relation between these three categories and used as a proxy for editorial preferences towards the type of treatment of the subject usually expected by the journal the article contents of nine generalist and five specialized journals are analysed for the two periods 1991 1995 and 1996 2000