A guide to graduate study in economics: ranking economics departments by fields of expertise

Southern Economic Journal, April, 2008 by Therese C. Grijalva, Clifford Nowell

1. Introduction

Each year, thousands of undergraduates apply for admission to graduate schools in economics intending to obtain a Ph.D. Many of these students have little idea on how to choose a graduate program, and many go to an undergraduate adviser looking for advice. Prospective graduate students and their advisers have little published research to help them in the process of choosing what schools best match the undergraduate's skills and interests.

This study highlights many of the characteristics of departments that offer doctoral degrees in economics and provides information on both overall productivity and productivity by subject field. This research is significant for those looking to obtain a Ph.D. in economics because the choice of where to attend graduate school has been shown to be important in both academic and nonacademic job markets. Research into the careers of Ph.D. economists (Barbezat 1992; McMillen and Singell 1994; Stock and Alston 2000; Siegfried and Stock 2004) consistently indicates that graduates from top-rated schools fare better in academic and nonacademic job markets than their peers from lower-ranked programs.

Based on the finding that the quality of the school influences outcomes in the job market, the best advice for those applying to graduate school in economics may simply be to apply to the best schools to which you will likely be admitted. Yet this advice is of little value for those who are unlikely to be admitted into a top program yet have a strong interest in one of the many subject fields of economics and a strong desire to pursue a particular field. This group of students is left getting advice from an undergraduate adviser who cannot be expected to know the strengths of economics departments across the country or to search the Web pages of all the programs that offer a Ph.D. looking for clues as to what school is the best match.

In this article, we provide information to undergraduate students and their advisers on the research strengths of 129 economics departments that offer Ph.D. degrees in the United States and to identify schools that are ranked highly in the many different subject fields of economics. This article should also provide guidance to departments hiring new Ph.D. candidates within a specific field and to job candidates looking for information on potential academic employers.

This article differs from the many papers ranking the quality of economics departments by identifying the relative strength of all Ph.D. programs and by specifically providing information on all the major subject fields in economics. Although Tschirhart (1989) ranks departments in fields of expertise, only a limited set of fields is identified, and departments are ranked using data that are now over 20 years old. U.S. News and Worm Report (1) also provides a ranking of economics departments by field. Their ranking is based on survey responses of department chairs who were asked to rank all departments on a five-point scale. Department rankings by field can also be found on the EconPhd.net website (http://www.econphd.net). This site ranks departments by field, using publications in 63 highly ranked economics journals during the 1993-2003 period. The data we used as the basis for this article are more comprehensive and cover a larger time frame. We used all journals in which economists at the Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States had published during a 20-year period. Our data set consists of publications in 254 journals over the 20-year period 1985-2004. This analysis provides by far the most detailed, complete ranking of departments by field in the literature.

In addition to simply identifying the top 20 schools in each field, other information, not found elsewhere, is provided on the relative importance of the field at the school and how the scholarly output is distributed across the department's faculty. To measure the concentration of faculty in a field, we calculate a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). The HHI is particularly important for an undergraduate to consider. Planning to obtain a Ph.D. from a school in hopes of studying with a single person is a risky undertaking not only because the faculty member may move but also because any single faculty member can mentor only a limited number of students.

We recognize that ranking departments is fraught with danger. Thursby (2000) has pointed out that using single measures of department productivity suggests differences between many departments that are meaningless, a finding we reiterate when solely aggregate measures of performance are used. However, by providing detailed information on departments by field and by identifying the publication patterns of the faculty within the field, we are able to highlight some differences that aggregate measures gloss over.

2. Methods

Similar to Tschirhart (1989), the data-gathering stage consists of four basic steps: (i) identifying all Ph.D.-granting institutions in economics as of the 2004 spring semester, (2) (ii) identifying all tenure-track or tenured faculty as of the 2004 spring semester, (iii) acquiring a list of faculty publications, and (iv) determining the quality of each publication.