Rules versus Discretion in Committee Decision Making: An Application to the 2001 RAE for UK Economics Departments

The question of rules versus discretion has generated a great deal of debate in many areas of the social sciences. Recently, much of the discussion among academics and stakeholders about the assessment of research in UK higher education institutions has focused on the means that should be used to determine research quality. We present a model of committee decision-making when both rules and discretion are available. Some of the predictions of the model are tested empirically using the UK RAE 2001 results

Quality versus quantity: Ranking research records of economics departments in New Zealand

A comparison of research records of the current members of the 7 major economics departments in New Zealand, from 1990 onwards, using journal quality weights from the Laband and Piette (1994) study. The information, taken from the Econlit database, covers more than 500 economics journals, as of November 2000. 32 different ranking measures are computed. According to 29 of these, the top three departments are Auckland, VUW and Canterbury. By 27 measures, Auckland takes the number one spot, while the relative rankings of VUW and Canterbury, and the remaining departments, depend on the measures used.

Quality versus quantity: Ranking research records of economics departments in New Zealand

A comparison of research records of the current members of the 7 major economics departments in New Zealand, from 1990 onwards, using journal quality weights from the Laband and Piette (1994) study. The information, taken from the Econlit database, covers more than 500 economics journals, as of November 2000. 32 different ranking measures are computed. According to 29 of these, the top three departments are Auckland, VUW and Canterbury. By 27 measures, Auckland takes the number one spot, while the relative rankings of VUW and Canterbury, and the remaining departments, depend on the measures used.

Ranking Journals Following a Matching Model Approach: An Application to Public Economics Journals

Journal rankings based on citation indexes are widely used in the economics field. This paper proposes an alternative way to rank journals based on the publishing behavior of top-ranked authors. I justify this approach by depicting the scientific publishing market as following a matching process. Compared with the citation approach, the methodology that we propose has advantages in terms of time effort to produce national and subdiscipline rankings. It also corrects the impact underestimation that the citation approach tends to produce in new and re-founded journals. This paper proposes an empirical application to the case of public economics journals. Copyright 2008 Blackwell Publishing, Inc..