| Abstract: |
Rankings of academic departments are widely used by universities throughout
the world as benchmarks to allocate efficiently their research funds to
different departments, and further, as signals of high-quality education to
attract or retain the most skillful and promising students and faculty. They
are also used by academic departments themselves to define performance targets
and shape optimal marketing strategies and further by academics and students
when making their decisions on career advancements and investments in
education, respectively. At aggregate level, rankings serve as informative
policy instruments for national governments, as well as for country unions, in
defining research budgets levels and optimally allocate them to domestic
universities and country members, respectively. For instance, the development
of Lisbon Agenda (2000) and the associated commitment of European Council
(2005) to increase R&D funding in EU, were mainly triggered by the observed
gap in leading-edge research between EU member countries and the U.S., as
robustly evidenced by worldwide institutional rankings. In economic
profession, there is a long tradition in ranking departments. Existing work
commonly uses various measures of research output to rank departments. Laband
(1985) used counts of citations to assess economics departments performance,
while Yotopoulos (1961), and Niemi (1975) focused on number of articles
published in top journals. Along the same lines, Yeager (1978) and Bairam
(1978) considered total number of pages published in high-ranked journals.
Recognizing that the quality of publications matters, Graveset al., (1982),
and Scott and Mittias (1996) used AER-equivalent pages to adjust for
journal-quality differences. Along the same line of argument, Conroy et al.
(1994), and Dusansky and Veron (1998) looked also at AER-equivalent page
counts using Laband and Piettes's (1994) updating of Liebowitz and Palmer's
(1984) journal rank to weight journals. Similarly, Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003)
provided a worldwide ranking of economics departments correcting further for
biases arising from lagged journal weights and self-citations inclusions.
There have been also rankings based on Ph.D. placements (Amir and Knauff,
2008) and averages of ranks statistics (Coupe, 2003). Most of the studies
highlighted above focus solely on research output measures to rank economics
departments such as number of articles, article pages, citations or
combinations of them. Needless to say, such measures lack important
information on research inputs use and thus might be considered as
inappropriate, especially when comparisons are to be made. For instance,
published articles and subsequently citations are likely to be proportionally
related to faculty size. Similarly, differences in research funds, research
environment and other research inputs between departments are likely to
explain observed differences in research output produced. Hence, adjusting at
least for some sort of inputs variations between departments is a necessary
prerequisite prior comparing actual departments performance in order to obtain
meaningful rankings. The important dimension of research inputs has been
considered only by a limited number of studies in the field. At micro level
(department level), Conroy et al. (1995) and Scott and Mittias (1996) ranked
economics departments in U.S. based on productivity performance as measured by
output per faculty. Using NRC (1995) survey data, Thursby (2000) tested for
differences in quality ratings between economics departments in U.S.
accounting for faculty size, number of federal grants, and expenditures on
library acquisitions. At macro level (country level), Kirman and Dahl (1994)
and Kocher and Sutter (2001) provided aggregated country rankings adjusting
for research inputs such as financial resources and population. Finallly,
Kocher et al. (2006) adopted a DEA approach to compile a productivity-based
ranking of OECD countries using country's R&D expenditures, number of
economics departments, and population as research inputs. Three important
observations can be drawn from the existing literature as reviewed earlier.
First, most of the work in the field neglects to adjust for differences in
research inputs among departments, producing therefore less informative
rankings, inappropriate for comparison purposes. On the other hand, the few
exceptional studies that do consider for research inputs variations focus
exclusively on U.S. Second, the majority of studies are based on journals
rankings constructed over a certain period of time that, more often than not,
does not coincide with the corresponding period of departments rankings. This
implies that journal weights used to adjust for quality differences in
publications are likely to misestimate the true quality of the journals at the
time of investigation and subsequently the true performance of departments.
Third, most of the existing work provides either university- or country-level
rankings but does not combine them. It would be quite informative though to
assess performance at both micro- and macro-level combining at the same time
information from department and country rankings produced using the same
methodology. In this paper, we assess the relative performance of economics
departments in Europe using publication data in a core set of thirty-five top
research journals in economics during the period 2007-11. Rather than focusing
exclusively on output research measures, we assess performance on the basis of
a publishing productivity index which allows to account for differences in
research inputs among departments. The measurement of publishing productivity
is based on counts of AER-equivalent articles per faculty using Kalaitzidakis'
et al. (2011) updated journal weights computed over the same period with our
study, overcoming thus any concerns associated with lagged-weights bias. Data
on faculty size were obtained from an online search on departments websites at
the time of investigation. Based on publishing productivity performance,
comprehensive rankings are constructed at department level, as well as, at
country level by aggregating research output and inputs of economics
departments in each country. The distance of Greek economics departments from
the top european departments is finally assessed. |