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

The fourth column of Table 2, "Per Faculty Rank," shows how each school ranks when their total productivity sum is divided by the number of publishing faculty within the department; it represents the average productivity of publishing faculty in a department and may be the best indicator of the quality of the faculty for potential graduate students. For example, the California Institute of Technology has an overall rank of 38 and an average rank of 7, suggesting that the lower overall rank of the department is greatly influenced by the smaller size of the department and not due to the productivity of each publishing faculty member. A student attending this institution would likely obtain an education from "top 10" faculty even though the relatively small department size dampens the overall productivity ranking. The fifth column of Table 2 indicates the overall productivity ranking of departments based on the journal rankings of Laband and Piette (1994) that appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature. Notice that rankings using the SSCI or those calculated by Laband and Piette (1994) identify the same top 10 schools, and there is only one difference in the top 20 schools.

The sixth column of Table 2, "Top Field," indicates each department's best subject field. Top field was determined by summing each department's productivity for each JEL category, using the first JEL code identified by the author as a guide and then choosing the subject field with the highest sum. The seventh column of Table 2 shows the HHI for each school. The HHI is typically used to measure the degree of market concentration for a particular industry. In this study, the HHI provides information on how concentrated the research is among the number of faculty publishing in the department. The HHI is found by squaring the faculty member's share of the department's total productivity and then summing the results:

HHI = [n.summation over (i=1)] [s.sup.2.sub.i]

where s represents the productivity share of the ith faculty member. Values for the index can range from 0 to 1, depending on the distribution of publication patterns across the faculty at the school. A value of 1.0 indicates that all the publications result from a single individual, and a value of 0 implies that the publications are spread equally among the faculty in the area. (9)

The eighth column of Table 2, "Field Strength Index," demonstrates how well each department does in its top field relative to the department that is the number one rank in that particular field. For example, Harvard's top field is financial economics, and it is the top-ranked department in financial economics; hence, Harvard has a field strength index of 1.0. Princeton University's top field is microeconomics (JEL code D), although its field strength index in microeconomics is 0.88, indicating that it produces 88% of the research of the top-ranked school in the microeconomics category. (10) It is important to note that some universities may not offer a field in their top field (see footnotes for Table 2). Finally, the last column of Table 2, "Average Ph.D. Graduates (2002-2007)," provides information on the size of each program, and is included to provide additional information to potential applicants. (11) A significant portion of graduate education is obtained from one's classmates. As such, this figure provides information regarding the activity level of the graduate education within a department. A department may have many productive scholars but may not be as actively engaged in its graduate education.