Ranking U.S. Economics Programs by Faculty and Graduate Publications: An Update Using 1994-2009 Data

[Author Affiliation]Michael A McPherson, , , , mcpherson@unt.edu[Acknowledgment]The author gratefully acknowledges careful research assistance from Megan Dorman and Taylor Bon.1. IntroductionThere is a sizable and long-standing amount of literature involving the ranking of economics programs in the United States. Scott and Mitias (1996), among others, have observed that rankings continue to interest those in our discipline for a number of reasons. First, rankings may provide information to academic job seekers regarding the quality of the research environments that exist at different institutions. Second, rankings may convey information to potential students about the quality of the faculty or about the quality of the training at programs they may attend. Third, rankings may provide information about potential output of young economists that academic departments or other employers may wish to hire. Finally, there may be a certain amount of interest among academic economists and among university administrators in "benchmarking" programs in economics. Earlier literature has found that rankings can change considerably over time (especially for programs outside of the top 20). Given this churning and the usefulness of rankings, it is important to update rankings periodically.1There has been a variety of methods used to rank economics departments. The strengths and flaws of each approach have been widely discussed in the literature, although the various rankings generally yield similar results, particularly with respect to the elite programs. An early effort by Fusfeld (1956) ranked departments according to the affiliations of authors presenting papers at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association. Others have surveyed department heads or senior faculty. Gerrity and McKenzie (1978), Laband (1985), and others have used the number of times articles are cited as a way to assess research quality. Beginning with Niemi (1975), several rankings have been developed that are based on pages published in top economics journals by faculty or by graduates of economics programs.In the "pages published" literature there exists considerable heterogeneity in terms of which programs are ranked and which journals are used in the construction of the rankings. This limits the extent to which rankings may be considered comparable. Of course, even with identical methodology it is not possible to design perfectly comparable rankings over time given that the profession's assessment of the relative quality of journals is not static and that new journals come into being. Nevertheless, there exists a succession of studies using similar methodology, allowing reasonable comparability of rankings over time. This strand of the literature began with Graves, Marchand, and Thompson (1982) and Graves, Marchand, and Thompson (1984) and covered the 1974-1978 period. Hirsch et al. (1984) and Scott and Mitias (1996) added the 1978-1983 and 1984-1993 periods, respectively. In addition to permitting an examination of how programs may have changed in rank over a substantially longer time period than has been considered elsewhere in the literature, this strand of the literature offers the singular advantage of ranking the top 240 programs rather than the more limited focus on the top 50 or top 100 programs used in other rankings. Scott and Mitias (1996) noted that the top programs are less likely to make significant rank changes over time, while lower-ranked programs seem to be capable of making modest changes that lead to dramatic jumps in rankings. The present article extends this approach using 1994-2009 data. Because this is a substantially longer time period than in any of the previous studies, I split the data into two eight-year intervals: 1994-2001 and 2002-2009. I present several different rankings. First, I consider rankings based on pages published in the top 50 journals by faculty at each institution. …