Is there a rank for graduate programs in academic placement?

[soundchaser]

Even economics is just one of many foci of Stanford GSB, it has 5 JBC medalers in its relatively small econ group, which is, in absolute term, at the level of MIT econ, Harvard econ, Stanford econ and Princeton econ. Are you saying Queen's econ is better than those? I did my undergrad in a Canadian department and I know Queen's is great. But just based on your claim that Queen's is better than Toronto I would guess you don't really know Canadian schools as well as you think.

[kingofloss6]

If you are a professor, then perhaps you should stop your stubborn comment about economics ranking system.

Thank you for pointing out that we were talking about US school rankings. I simply didn't assume that since I am not American.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/economics-business

This was the site I was referring to.

 

I simply said that Stanford SGB is a business school and it's natural that it places low on the economics ranking scale. Business schools generally have many research areas and economics is only a subset of their research at Stanford SGB. I'm very aware that Stanford SGB places their graduates at top economics schools occasionally, but most of them are placed at Business graduate schools, which makes sense. Compare Stanford Economics Department to Stanford SGB, and would you still argue that Stanfrod SGB is a better Economics school than Stanford Economics department? You are fooling yourself with the term "reputation" if this is the case.

 

In fact, you should take a look at this since I think other people have sacrificed precious time to criticize the ridiculous US news ranking of the world universities. I decline to spend any more time explaining why USnews ranking system is flawed, and unless you are working for US news ranking system, I urge you to rethink about your favorability of US news ranking.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/your-annual-reminder-to-ignore-the-em-us-news-world-report-em-college-rankings/279103/

 

Subtle troll detected!

[chateauheart]

We all know the "normal" repec ranking doesn't work because it has up to 10x differences in author count, and it also has plenty of graduate students in its registration. However, you can simply use the repec ranking restricted to top 10 authors, which mostly solves both problems.

 

https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.allbestdetail.html

 

Note that this is still biased against smaller institutions, because when applied to a smaller base, this method selects a sample closer to the average. But this adjustment is already enough to generate a ranking that's mostly consistent with consensus (and inconsistent with whatever is going on in dregon03's head). U.S. mostly dominate top 50 institutions in economics, with a few European institutions scattered in.

 

The only notable flaw is that if you want to use this to proxy for a PhD program's strength, it will still underrate small, elite b-school econ programs such as Stanford GSB and Kellogg.

 

(It should be common knowledge that Stanford GSB's PhD programs in economics, political economics, and finance are all top 3 in their respective disciplines. Kellogg is top 10 for economic theory students.)

 

 

 

And yes, that USNWR-GUR econ/business ranking is irrelevant for us. It includes accounting research and marketing research, which actually constitute more data than all of economists' output.

[chateauheart]

There are two other, specific ways to get graduate program rankings from Repec.

 

1. The first is to simply use their "Students" score for institutions:

 

https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.students.html

 

This is a very accurate reflection of a program's historical strength.

 

The disadvantage is that it doesn't put extra weight on recent convergence/standardization of economics. In essence, the top 6-8 freshwater programs (Chicago/Minn/Roch/CMU, then arguably Penn/UCLA/Virginia/Iowa) are substantially rewarded for their dominance in graduate training during the 1970s-90s. Some UK programs that fell behind are also higher than they should be, based on 50s-70s graduates.

 

 

 

2. To add recency bias to the above, and the diminishing importance of a program's methodological training relative to having better faculty mentors, I found it best to add "ADScCites" from their sandbox page ( https://ideas.repec.org/cgi-bin/newrank.cgi ) and then use a harmonic rank.

 

(in other words: choose to rank by institutions, untick everything except ADScCites and Students, pick harmonic, don't remove the highest/lowest rank, and don't restrict to last 10 years because there's already a discount factor)

 

Once you take out the non-PhD-granting institutions (unfortunately, it's impossible to remove them without messing up another criterion), the list is mostly consistent with consensus opinion, and its US ranking is also very close to USNWR's reputation-based ranking. This is a great result, because these come from two separate approaches.

 

 

 

Here's the second method's top 50, with some cleaning up:

 

 

1 Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) 3.41

2 Economics Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) 3.86

3 Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (USA) 6.1

4 Department of Economics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (USA) 6.46

5 Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (USA) 7.82

6 Department of Economics, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, California (USA) 10

7 Economics Department, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (USA) 10.43

8 Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, California (USA) 11

9 Department of Economics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA) 13.84

10 Department of Economics, Columbia University, New York City, New York (USA) 14

11 Economics Department, London School of Economics (LSE), London, United Kingdom 14.63

12 Department of Economics, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom 14.66

13 Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) 18.88

14 Department of Economics, University of California-San Diego (UCSD), La Jolla, California (USA) 20.49

15 Economics Department, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (USA) 21

16 Economics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA) 21.87

17 Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, California (USA) 21.87

18 Department of Economics, New York University (NYU), New York City, New York (USA) 23.25

19 Department of Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (USA) 24.04

20 Stern School of Business, New York University (NYU), New York City, New York (USA) 25.08

21 Economics Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin (USA) 26.11

22 Economics Department, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York (USA) 26.37

23 Tepper School of Business Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) 26.55

24 Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) 27.25

25 Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom 28.36

26 Department of Economics, University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, California (USA) 31.55

27 Department of Economics, Tepper School of Business Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) 31.86

28 Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) 33.09

29 Department of Economics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (USA) 33.2

30 Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE), Barcelona, Spain 35.64

31 Department of Economics, University College London (UCL), London, United Kingdom 35.93

32 Department of Economics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts (USA) 38.15

33 Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada 38.72

34 Paris School of Economics, Paris, France 41.15

35 Economics Department, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada 41.75

36 Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland 42.18

37 Department of Economics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (USA) 44.92

38 Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), Toulouse, France 44.99

39 Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany 45.74

40 Haas School of Business, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, California (USA) 45.8

41 Department of Economics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland (USA) 45.86

42 Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 46.62

43 Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (USA) 47.5

44 Department of Economics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) 48.9

45 Economics Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (USA) 49.35

46 Department of Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland (USA) 50.04

47 Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada 53.95

48 Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom 55.49

49 Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada 55.91

50 Economics Department, University of California-Davis, Davis, California (USA) 60.59