Research Productivity of the Economics Profession in East Asia

I. INTRODUCTION Research productivity is often ranked for economics departments based on page counts of journal publications (for example, Graves, Marchand, and Thompson [1982]), while others rate the departments by the number of citations attributed to their faculty (for example, Davis and Papanek [1984]). Recently, Scott and Mitias [1996] used "flow" and "stock" concepts in their departmental rankings. While the flow of research can be counted to give credit to the department where authors are affiliated at the time of publication, the stock ranking counts a currently affiliated faculty's stock of past and current research. The alternative rankings also use different sets of journals as well as varied weighting schemes to standardize the length of journal pages and to adjust for journal quality. While several different methods have been used to rank economics departments in the United States, no such assessment has been done for East Asian universities. This article aims to fill this gap by ranking economics professions in East Asia based solely on research productivity. For the purpose of comparison with U.S. universities, our methodology closely follows that of Scott and Mitias [1996] with some variations in the sample length. First, the ranking counts the "stock" of past and current research (for example, Hogan [1984], Laband [1985], Conroy and Dusansky [1995], Scott and Mitias [1996], and Dusansky and Vernon [1998]). Fine research scholars move from one university to another, a phenomenon that sometimes leads to dramatic changes in school performance. However, labor mobility depends to some extent on the degree of importance of research to which a university is attached; more open and research-oriented schools often hire researchers (and their accompanying stock of published research) from other institutions in the region or more often from abroad, while others more or less insulate themselves from inflows of new research. A more accurate reflection of current reality is, therefore, to know who is at a particular university today, not who was at it in the past. Thus, economics faculty affiliated with East Asian universities during the autumn 1997 semester are counted for the stock ranking in East Asia. The economics faculty include all economists in business schools as well as all in economics departments. (1) Faculty names were obtained directly from department chairs and each school's home page on the internet. Second, the basic ranking relies on page counts of articles published in a set of 36 quality journals over the period 1990-96. Page counts are employed to capture many variations in the length of articles across journals. The EconLit CD-ROM (September 1997) includes all international journals that have appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature. The choice of a set of quality journals is, however, open to question. Graves, Marchand, and Thompson [1982], for example, examined publications in a set of 24 journals, Hogan [1984] looked at a set of 4, Laband [1985] a set of 27, Bairam [1994] a set of 5, and Conroy and Dusansky [1995] and Dusansky and Vernon [1998] each a set of 8 journals. The criterion employed here for top-36 journals relies on the choice in Scott and Mitias [1996] in which the original set of top-24 journals in Graves, Marchand, and Thompson, [1982] was updated. (2) To check the sensitivity of our findings with alternative sets of journals, we ranked these schools based on top-24 and top-42 journals. The list of 42 top journals was provided to us by Dusansky and Vernon [1998]. (3) Third, "standardized page counts" are employed (for example, Graves, Marchand, and Thompson [1982], Hirsch, Austin, Brooks, and Moore [1984], Conroy and Dusansky [1995], Scott and Mitias [1996], and Dusansky and Vernon [1998]). The Scott-Mitias [1996] conversion factors are used for the basic ranking, in which the number of pages published in 36 journals were standardized to the average length of a page in the AER. …