The Economics Olympics: Ranking U.S. Economics Departments Based on Prizes, Medals, and Other Awards

[Author Affiliation]Franklin G Mixon Jr, , , , mixon_franklin@columbusstate.eduKamal P Upadhyaya, , , , [Acknowledgment]The authors thank a referee of this journal for helpful suggestions. The usual caveat applies.1. IntroductionDusansky and Vernon (1998a, p. 157) claim that "[m]any academics publicly claim to hate rankings, even while they privately pore over them." Gibbons and Fish (1991) go further by stating that the ranking of faculty research output and economics departments is just as important to academic economists as the ESPN football poll is to coaches, players, students, and university alumni. Moreover, as the debate surrounding Dusansky and Vernon's (1998a) economics department ranking indicates, tastes vary about as widely in the academic ranking genre as they do in college football and other sports (Dusansky and Vernon 1998b; Feinberg 1998; Griliches and Einav 1998). Yet academic rankings can be important, given that they serve as a basis for attracting and retaining top faculty and graduate students, and are often used by university administrators to allocate scarce educational funds (Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos 2003).To date, the methodologies for ranking economics departments have also varied widely. These have included citation-based analyses (Coupe 2003; Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos 2003; Grijalva and Nowell 2008), publication counts (Dusansky and Vernon 1998a; Mixon and Upadhyaya 2001), placement of Ph.D. students (Amir and Knauff 2008), and even economics blogging (Mixon and Upadhyaya 2010) and participation in annual economics association meetings (Smyth 1992). This study provides a novel alternative to traditional citation-based rankings of U.S. economics departments. Specifically, we rank the top 25 U.S. economics departments on the basis of four prestigious awards won/held by the current faculty of these departments.2. Ranking U.S. Economics Departments Using Prestigious AwardsThe four prestigious economics awards used in this study to rank U.S. economics departments include (i) the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, (ii) the John Bates Clark Medal, (iii) the American Economic Association's (AEA's) Distinguished Fellow Award, and (iv) the AEA's Richard T. Ely Lecturer award. These awards, shown in Figure 1, are generally based on the quality of one's contributions to economics research, and, thus, they offer an alternative to ranking economics departments using more traditional methods that employ citations to publications, publication counts, publication pages, and other metrics.Figure 1Prestigious awards in economics. (Figure omitted. See article image.)In 1968, economics joined chemistry, literature, medicine/physiology, physics, and work in peace as one of the areas recognized annually by the Nobel Prize.1 The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is the world's most prestigious award in economics. The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is awarded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which has more than 500 members. Membership in the Academy "constitutes exclusive recognition of successful research achievements."2 The John Bates Clark Medal is awarded "to that American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." From 1947 to 2009, the Medal was awarded on a biannual basis; beginning in 2010, the Medal is awarded annually.3 The John Bates Clark Medal is widely viewed as the second most prestigious award in economics. The AEA's Distinguished Fellow Award was first given in 1965.4 The AEA Distinguished Fellow Award is given to all past presidents of the AEA, as well as those elected among "economists of high distinction" in the United States and Canada.5 The fourth and final economics award used in our ranking is the Richard T. …