A citation-based analysis of economists and economics programs.

Medoff, Marshall H.

Introduction

The focus of this paper is to rank academic economists in terms of their research quality. A ranking of top economists serves several functions. First, it provides to economics departments, seeking to improve their relative ranking, explicit information about who are high quality economists. Second, the ranking can be used by graduate students as "reputational capital" in terms of how their dissertation, supervised by high-quality economists, will be perceived by prospective employers.

In the past twenty-five years there has been a growing literature on the rankings of economics departments in the United States. Articles ranking economics departments use, as measures of quality, either the number of articles or number of pages published in a sample of "major" economic journals.(1)

This ranking method is conceptually flawed for a variety of reasons (1) it assumes that every article published in this subset of economics journals is equivalent in research quality; (2) articles published in these major economics journals may never be read or used; (3) other forms of publishing such as books, monographs, or newspapers are totally ignored; (4) no attempt is made to measure the impact or innovative quality of articles; (5) it promotes a strong bias against researchers who engage in interdisciplinary, applied, or policy research and whose publications may be of similar quality to a theoretical article but are more likely to appear in "lesser" journals; (6) it ignores the problem of publishing favoritism (i.e. faculty and graduates of the same university as the editor of a journal have a higher probability of having their articles published and to be allocated more pages than those of unaffiliated faculty, Laband, 1985).

The main problem with these ranking methods is that they focus on the department rather than the individual economist. It is as if the department is an entity in and of itself. Economics departments are an aggregation of individual economists. Any economics department can increase its relative ranking by bidding away more productive faculty members from higher ranked departments, provided that they know who such individuals are.

Medoff (1989) ranked economists affiliated with an economics department for the period 1971-1985. This paper extends Medoff's rankings of economists in several ways. First, all academic economists, not just those affiliated with an economics department, are examined. Second, more economists are ranked. Third, a longer time period is surveyed. Fourth, senior economists (those between the ages of 65 and 70) are considered. Fifth, inferences are made regarding the quality rankings of departments and graduate programs.

Citations as a Measure of Quality

Stigler and Friedland (1975) argue that a more objective measure to judge the research quality of economists is the number of citations made to their research publications. The number of citations received by an individual economist is an indication of the amount of recognition an economist's research has received and reflects the degree to which others have made use of that work. Stigler and Friedland (1975) note: "Citations are an easy way to transfer the exposition of a theory or problem from your paper to someone else, so in the larger view citations reveal a form of intellectual collaboration. To some degree citations are influence, for they influence the reading by readers of the citing paper." Gerrity and McKenzie (1978) argue that the number of citations an economist receives during a given year is a measure of the flow of citations from a stock of past articles. They maintain that this flow is a proxy for the value of human capital an individual has accumulated. The productivity of an economist is a function of this flow and its stock. Diamond (1986) contends that a citation represents evidence that the person cited has done research that is viewed as germane to the current research frontier of economic knowledge and relevant to those attempting to extend this frontier.

Several studies have empirically examined whether citation counts are a good indicator of research quality. Cole and Cole (1973) found that citation counts were highly correlated with various measures of quality such as awards of distinction, prestige of awards, scientific significance, and professional recognition. Hagstrom (1971) found that holding constant the characteristics of the department faculty the number of citations were a better predictor of departmental prestige than the number of articles published. Hamermesh, Johnson, and Weisbrod (1982) and Diamond (1986) found that the number of citations not only were a positive and statistically significant determinant of a faculty member's salary, but an additional citation added more to salary than the publication of an additional article or book. These studies suggest that the number of citations are a better measure of the innovative quality and influence of one's work than counting the number of pages or articles a person publishes.

Using citation counts as a measure of research quality has several potential methodological shortcomings. Some citations may be merely critical of the work cited, point out errors or flaws in a work, used to satisfy the preferences of referees or editors who wish to see certain articles cited, or there may be a parochial network of authors who cite teach others' publications relatively frequently. There is some evidence that the magnitude of these biases are not large. Stigler and Friedland (1975) found that less than seven percent of the citations they studied could be classified as unfavorable. They did detect some evidence of parochial citations among some of the largest producers of doctorates. They note that many of the parochial citations could be attributed to familiarity, friendship, presentation, and emphasis of economics graduate course materials.

Laband (1985, p. 219) has pointed out that even though such criticisms of citation counts are legitimate none of these flaws, as applied to the use of citations as a proxy for quality of research contributions, affects any individual economist to any greater or lesser degree than others. Thus citations may be the most objective means of ranking economists currently in use.

Data

The name of all economists from the top 160 universities in the United States (using the latest ratings from Hirsch, Austin, Brooks, and Moore, 1984) were collected from the American Economic Association's December 1993 Survey of Members, classification of Members by Academic Affiliation. As in all other studies of departmental rankings, economists in all departments were examined (e.g., economics, business, agriculture, education, medicine).

Only economists who were less than seventy years old as of 1992 were examined.(2) There are several reasons for restricting the sample to those economists less than seventy years of age. First, most private and public universities have a suggested, though not mandatory, retirement policy at age seventy. Second, many faculty members who are seventy or older are either in semi-retirement or have emeritus status. Third, if the purpose of ranking top economists is to provide economic departments with a low-cost information proxy for those individuals who are highly productive, then listing older economists is of no value since most universities are typically unwilling to hire someone who has a shortened employment span and a high probability of potential health problems. In addition, economists who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics are excluded from the sample because they have already been recognized for the outstanding quality of their research both within and outside the economics profession. Over 3,000 economists were examined.

All citations received by these economists were obtained from the 1971-1992 volumes of the Social Sciences Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index lists, alphabetically by author, all citations to articles, unpublished works, monographs, and books from over 4800 journals and periodicals.

There is one technical problem in using the Social Sciences Citation Index which is that citations to collaborative works are listed only after the name of the first author. Several studies have examined the extent of this coauthorship bias. Long and McGinnis (1982) found that the correlation between unadjusted citation counts and citation counts adjusted for multiple authorship was over .90. Liebowitz and Palmer (1988) reported that they found little difference in the number of citations received by economists whose last names came at different quintiles of an alphabetized list of a sample of individuals. Gerrity and McKenzie (1978) found that the net effect after adjusting for coauthorship in their sample of economists was less than two percent. Hamermesh, Johnson, and Weisbrod (1982) found that the probability that a person was the first author of an article was not a statistically significant determinant of a faculty member's salary. Diamond (1986) found there was no gain in explanatory power when non-first-author citations were included in academic salary regressions. Petry (1988) showed that proportionately more research is coauthored in institutions with low publication rates presumably because such individuals do not have the necessary research skills or talent to publish on their own. Together these studies suggest that, while a coauthorship bias does exist, quantitatively the bias is small and does not diminish the value of citation counts as a measure of quality.(3)

Ranking of Academic Economists

Columns (1) and (3) of Table 1 list the top 250 academic economists ranked according to the total number of citations (excluding self-citations) each received during the period 1971-1992.(4) Several observations can be made from the rankings in Table 1.(5) First, the top economist is E. F. Fama of the University of Chicago. He has received nearly 1800 citations (or 31 percent) more than the number 2 ranked academic economist. Second, if one believes that large differences in the number of citations received by academic economists reflect large differences in quality the top 7 academic economists are clearly "superstars", each having 22 percent or more citations than those academic economists ranked below them.(6) Third, Harvard University dominates the ranking of the top 10 economists having five ranked economists. The only other university with more than one economist in the top 10 was the University of Chicago with two.(7)

The median age of the top 250 academic economists was 52 and nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the economists were fifty years or older.(8) It might be legitimately argued that ranking by total number of citations is biased or misleading since the total number of citations received may be a function of the amount of research capital acquired over an economist's career life-cycle. In order to control for this possibility, the citation rank was recomputed by dividing the total number of citations received by an academic economist by the number of years (as of 1992) since the faculty member received the Ph.D. degree. The rank by mean number, and the mean number adjusted for experience, are shown in Table 1, columns (4) and (5).

The adjustment for experience resulted in considerable change in the rankings. Nearly 69 percent of the 250 top academic economists changed by more than ten positions and 45 percent changed by more than thirty positions. Economists fifty years and older, on average, fell by more than 24 positions and economists under the age of fifty moved up, on average, 43 places.

There are several plausible explanations for this finding. (1) Citations represent research done over the span of a career. Younger economist's citations may reflect research of a more recent vintage than older economists. (2) Older ranked economists may have already established their reputation for quality research and have different priorities (administration, government service, private consulting, newspaper per or television commentators) than younger economists who have not yet received such recognition. (3) As an economist ages the law of diminishing returns may occur resulting from a depreciation in human capital. (4) The academic reward structure may be such that for older ranked economists the marginal monetary returns from an additional article may be considerably less than for the younger ranked economists.(9)

Ranking of Top Schools

Table 2 uses the results from Table 1 in order to rank schools. Column (1) of Table 2 ranks the top 15 schools by the number of the top 250 academic economists affiliated with the school, and column (3) ranks the school by the total number of citations received by their top economists. The first six ranked schools, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Yale and Princeton are the "elite" U.S. universities having approximately 40 percent of the top 250 economists. Among the top six schools Harvard clearly dominates having over 30 percent more top economists and 70 percent more citations than the second ranked school.(10)

[TABULAR DATA 1 NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]

TABLE 2
Ranking of Top 15 Schools

 Rank By
Ranking By Total Number Total Number
Total Number Total Number of Citations of Citations
of Top of Top By Top By Top
Economists Economists Economists Economists

1. Harvard 29 1 57155
2. Stanford 22 3 27425
3. Chicago 14 2 33348
4. MIT 14 4 27054
5. Princeton 13 5 16571
6. Yale 13 8 14862
7. Berkeley 11 6 15837
8. UCLA 11 9 13946
9. Columbia 10 7 15648
10. Penn 8 11 9828
11. Wisconsin 8 12 9023
12. Maryland 6 10 10685
13. Michigan 6 14 6441
14. Minnesota 5 13 6512
15. Northwestern 5 15 6301

Ranking By Rank By
Total Number Citations Per Citation Per
of Top Top Top
Economists Economist Economist

1. Harvard 2 1970.86
2. Stanford 11 1246.59
3. Chicago 1 2382.00
4. MIT 3 1932.43
5. Princeton 8 1274.69
6. Yale 13 1143.23
7. Berkeley 6 1439.73
8. UCLA 9 1267.82
9. Columbia 5 1564.80
10. Penn 12 1228.50
11. Wisconsin 14 1127.88
12. Maryland 4 1780.83
13. Michigan 15 1073.50
14. Minnesota 7 1302.40
15. Northwestern 10 1260.20

Note: When top number of top economists are equal, rank is based on total number of citations by top economists.

Column (5) of Table 2 ranks the schools by the number of citations per top economist. One difficulty with this measure of quality is that one prolific "superstar" economist can pull up an entire school's average. Not surprisingly, there is considerable variability in this ranking as compared to the two other quality ranking measures. For example, Maryland ranked twelfth in total number of top economists, tenth in total number of citations by their top economists, but fourth in per top economist citations.

Table 3 examines the extent the rankings of the top 15 schools listed in Table 2 have changed over time. Columns (2) and (3) of Table 3 reproduces the rankings of the top 15 schools from Table 2 of this paper. The remaining columns of Table 3 show the rankings of these same 15 schools, over different time periods, done by three other studies (Hirsch, et al., 1984; Graves, et al., 1982; Niemi, 1975). The three studies all used the total number of AER-equivalent-sized pages published in twenty-four top economics journals to rank schools.

TABLE 3
Comparative Ranking of Top 15 Schools

 Number of
 Top Citations by Hirsch et. al.
School Economists Top Economists (1978-1983)

Harvard 1 2 2
Stanford 2 11 3
Chicago 3 1 1
MIT 4 3 7
Princeton 5 8 13
Yale 6 13 5
Berkeley 7 6 9
UCLA 8 9 10
Columbia 9 5 12
Penn 10 12 4
Wisconsin 11 14 8
Maryland 12 4 35
Michigan 13 15 15
Minnesota 14 7 14
Northwestern 15 10 6

 Graves et. al. Niemi
School (1974-1978) (1970-1974)

Harvard 2 1
Stanford 3 5
Chicago 1 2
MIT 6 6
Princeton 10 8
Yale 7 3
Berkeley 9 9
UCLA 8 10
Columbia 17 27
Penn 5 7
Wisconsin 4 4
Maryland 24 23
Michigan 12 12
Minnesota 20 16
Northwestern 11 13

Note: Time period studied in parentheses

Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, UCLA, Minnesota, Northwestern and Michigan have tended to have fairly stable rankings over the past two decades. Among the other schools MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Maryland, and Berkeley have been steadily improving in the relative rankings, while Yale and Wisconsin have been falling over time.

Various studies have observed a diminishing rate of publication as economics faculty age (Tuckman and Leahy, 1975; Bell and Seater, 1978; Hamermesh, Johnson, and Weisbrod, 1982). A myriad of reasons have been offered to explain this finding.(11) In order to transcend the effect of a decline in publication output as an economist ages many of the aforementioned top universities must have had some screening mechanism in order to maintain or improve their relative ranking over time. Hogan (1984) has argued that highly ranked universities pursue the strategy of allowing high-quality capital formation to occur at other universities. These other universities act as a training ground where relatively inexperienced economists acquire skills and/or are identified by their research record as being high-quality economists. Once individual economists demonstrate the ability to produce high-quality research, the top ranked schools enter the academic market and bid the high-quality economists away from their existing universities by offering attractive pecuniary (e.g., endowed chairs) and nonpecuniary (e.g., light teaching loads, more research assistance and equipment) benefits.

Rankings of Graduate Programs

One issue of particular importance to prospective and current Ph.D. students is which universities have the best economics graduate programs. The best graduate schools are defined as those whose Ph.D. programs have produced the greatest number of the previously identified top 250 academic economists. Column (1) of Table 4 lists the top 15 Ph.D. programs. An alternative ranking method, the number of citations that these top 250 economist graduates have received, is shown in column (4) of Table 4.(12)

TABLE 4
Ranking of Top 15 Ph.D. Programs

Rank of Ph.D.
Program By Rank by Number Number of
Number of Top Number of Top of Citations of Citations of
Economist Economist Top Economist Top Economist
Graduates Graduates Graduates Graduates

1. Harvard 50 1 77324
2. MIT 46 2 60030
3. Chicago 31 3 55860
4. Yale 15 4 16362
5. Berkeley 11 5 12160
6. Princeton 9 7 11063
7. Stanford 9 9 9435
8. Carnegie 8 6 11088
9. Northwestern 6 8 9801
10. Minnesota 6 10 7605
11. J. Hopkins 6 11 7391
12. Columbia 5 12 7058
13. Wisconsin 5 13 6649
14. Michigan 4 14 5278
15. Penn 4 15 4883

Rank of Ph.D.
Program By Rank By Number Number of
Number of Top of Citations per Citations per
Economist Top Economist Top Economist
Graduates Graduates Graduates

1. Harvard 3 1546.48
2. MIT 8 1305.00
3. Chicago 1 1801.93
4. Yale 14 1090.80
5. Berkeley 13 1105.45
6. Princeton 11 1229.22
7. Stanford 15 1048.33
8. Carnegie 5 1386.00
9. Northwestern 2 1633.50
10. Minnesota 9 1267.50
11. J. Hopkins 10 1231.83
12. Columbia 4 1411.60
13. Wisconsin 6 1329.80
14. Michigan 7 1319.50
15. Penn 12 1220.75

Note: When number of top economists are equal, rank is based on total number of citations by top economists.

What stands out in Table 4 is that a relatively small number of Ph.D. programs produce a very large share of the top academic economists. The 15 top Ph.D. programs produced 86 percent of the top 250 academic economists in the United States. Even more striking is the dominance of Harvard, MIT, and Chicago whose Ph.D. programs together have produced over 50 percent of the top 250 academic economists. Graduating from any one of these three universities seems to be, in and of itself, a strong market signal about the expected post-Ph.D. quality of their doctorates' future research. If graduating from any of these top 15 Ph.D. programs is a screening mechanism for the expected quality of one's research it would not be surprising to observe a high degree of parochialism. That is for schools to hire a disproportionate number of their own doctorates than those from other graduate programs. One reason for expecting to observe parochialism is that graduate programs possess better and more reliable and extensive information about the quality of their own doctorates than the information provided by other graduate programs about their doctorates. A second possible reason is that graduates from a particular Ph.D. program may be more in harmony or compatible with that program's "school of economic thought".

Table 5, column (2) lists the total number of the top 250 academic economists who graduated from one of the top 15 Ph.D. programs and column (3) lists how many of those graduates are currently affiliated with the school they received their Ph.D. from. Column (4) measures the extent of parochialism being equal to the percentage of a Ph.D. program's top graduates who are currently affiliated with the same university. In terms of absolute numbers, Harvard MIT, Chicago, and to a lesser extent Princeton are most likely to be parochial employers. The extent of parochialism at these four institutions may in fact be underestimated if these universities are also more likely to hire a disproportionate number of doctorates from institutions that have an equivalent or identical school of economic thought (e.g., perhaps Chicago, Rochester, UCLA?).

TABLE 5
Parochial Employment

 Number of Top 250
 Economist Graduates
 Number of Top 250 Affiliated with School
School Economist Graduates Received Ph.D. From

Harvard 50 15
MIT 46 6
Chicago 31 9
Yale 15 2
Berkeley 11 1
Princeton 9 3
Stanford 9 2
Carnegie 8 0
Northwestern 6 1
Minnesota 6 1
J. Hopkins 6 0
Columbia 5 0
Wisconsin 5 0
Michigan 4 1
Pennsylvania 4 0

School % Parochialism

Harvard 30.00
MIT 13.04
Chicago 29.03
Yale 13.33
Berkeley 9.09
Princeton 33.33
Stanford 22.22
Carnegie 0
Northwestern 16.67
Minnesota 16.67
J. Hopkins 0
Columbia 0
Wisconsin 0
Michigan 25.00
Pennsylvania 0

Conclusion

This study used citation counts as a measure of research quality to rank the top 250 academic economists in the United States. Schools were also ranked by the number of the top 250 economists a university had on their faculty. The findings showed that five schools Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, MIT, and Princeton are elite among all universities. These five universities have on their faculty over one-third of the top 250 academic economists. An examination of where the top 250 economists received their doctorates found three universities Harvard, MIT, and Chicago to be giants among all Ph.D. schools. These three Ph.D. programs have produced over 50 percent of the top 250 economists. The dominance of these three Ph.D. programs is actually underestimated since the study excluded from the sample all Nobel Prize in Economics recipients. What emerges from this study is the proposition that until financial resources are more evenly divided among most universities the distribution of talent will always be skewed towards a relatively few universities. There will be relatively few and minor changes in the relative rankings of the top schools and this will only occur as top quality economists move from one top university to another top university.

Notes

(1.) A review of this literature is given by Colander (1989). More recent works include Tschirhart (1989), Petry (1988), Fish and Gibbons (1989), Cox and Chung (1991), Tremblay, Tremblay, and Lee (1990), Berger and Scott (1990), Gibbons and Fish (1991), Piette and Ross (1992), Chung, Cox, and Okunade (1993), and Bairam (1994).

(2.) In other words only academic economists born after the year 1922 were considered. All information about individual academic economists come from the 1993 American Economic Association's Survey of Members. It is presumed that all the individual information published is correct.

(3.) Another technical problem in using the Citation Index is that there may be clerical errors in the list of citations (misspelled names, missing initials, counting errors). There is, however, no reason to believe that there are systematic errors in the listing.

(4.) Other citations excluded were references to book reviews, corrections, and editorial items.

(5.) Of the top 250 academic economists only four were women (I. Adelman, F. D. Blau, K. Davis, A. O. Krueger). The highest ranked woman was I. Adelman of Berkeley at number 83.

(6.) James G. March of Stanford University had 4259 citations. However it appears that most academics consider him not to be an economist but an organizational theorist.

(7.) On October 12, 1993 while this paper was being typed it was announced that Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago had won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Fogel was included in the rankings as an independent measure of the quality ranking.

(8.) Economists seventy years and older (non-Nobel Prize winners) who would have made the rankings were: W.J. Baumol (Princeton) 6263 citations; J. S. Duesenberry (Harvard) 601 citations; R. Eisner (Northwestern) 983 citations; D. G. Johnson (Chicago) 585 citations; G. G. Judge (Illinois) 1482 citations; H. Leibenstein (Harvard) 1816 citations; J. Mincer (Columbia) 3103 citations; T. C. Schelling (Harvard) 2902 citations; G. Tullock (Arizona) 2623 citations; and J. A. Vanek (Cornell) 1166 citations.

(9.) While ordinary least squares could be used to estimate the impact of age on citations one would be unable to determine whether the empirical results were due to differences in publishing costs and university resources, diminishing monetary returns from publishing, differential rates of return between publishing, administration, and public service, patterns of scientific recognition, environment, physiological effects, or perspicacity.

(10.) Rosen (1981) argues that there are two reasons why one would expect to find top economists employed in a relatively few universities. First there is imperfect substitution among economists and lesser talent is a poor substitute for greater talent. Second, there is a scale economy of joint consumption which allows relatively few talented economists to service the entire economic research market.

(11.) For example, Bell and Seater (1978) argue that there are a multitude of influences all equally plausible. These include granting of tenure, change in publication emphasis to riskier longer term projects, physiological changes that accompany aging, diminishing monetary returns to publishing, greater preference for administrative positions, or larger financial rewards from nonpublishing activities such as consulting.

(12.) Column (5) of Table 4 ranks the top 15 Ph.D. programs by the number of citations per top economist graduates. This ranking must be interpreted with caution since, as pointed out previously, one prolific economist can bring up the average of an entire Ph.D. program.

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