A Guide to Graduate Study in Economics

By Grijalva, Therese C Nowell, Clifford

Therese C Grijalva, *Department of Economics, Weber State University, Ogden, UT 84408-3807, USA; tgrijalva@weber.edu; corresponding author. Clifford Nowell, [dagger]Department of Economics, Weber State University, Ogden, UT 84408-3807, USA; cnowell@weber.edu

face=+Bold; [Acknowledgment]face=-Bold;

Assistance in data gathering was provided by Adrienne Strong.

face=+Bold; 1. Introductionface=-Bold;

Each year, thousands of undergraduates apply for admission to graduate schools in economics intending to obtain a Ph.D. Many of these students have little idea on how to choose a graduate program, and many go to an undergraduate adviser looking for advice. Prospective graduate students and their advisers have little published research to help them in the process of choosing what schools best match the undergraduate’s skills and interests.

This study highlights many of the characteristics of departments that offer doctoral degrees in economics and provides information on both overall productivity and productivity by subject field. This research is significant for those looking to obtain a Ph.D. in economics because the choice of where to attend graduate school has been shown to be important in both academic and nonacademic job markets. Research into the careers of Ph.D. economists (Barbezat 1992; McMillen and Singell 1994; Stock and Alston 2000; Siegfried and Stock 2004) consistently indicates that graduates from top- rated schools fare better in academic and nonacademic job markets than their peers from lower-ranked programs.

Based on the finding that the quality of the school influences outcomes in the job market, the best advice for those applying to graduate school in economics may simply be to apply to the best schools to which you will likely be admitted. Yet this advice is of little value for those who are unlikely to be admitted into a top program yet have a strong interest in one of the many subject fields of economics and a strong desire to pursue a particular field. This group of students is left getting advice from an undergraduate adviser who cannot be expected to know the strengths of economics departments across the country or to search the Web pages of all the programs that offer a Ph.D. looking for clues as to what school is the best match.

In this article, we provide information to undergraduate students and their advisers on the research strengths of 129 economics departments that offer Ph.D. degrees in the United States and to identify schools that are ranked highly in the many different subject fields of economics. This article should also provide guidance to departments hiring new Ph.D. candidates within a specific field and to job candidates looking for information on potential academic employers.

This article differs from the many papers ranking the quality of economics departments by identifying the relative strength of all Ph.D. programs and by specifically providing information on all the major subject fields in economics. Although Tschirhart (1989) ranks departments in fields of expertise, only a limited set of fields is identified, and departments are ranked using data that are now over 20 years old. face=+Italic; U.S. News and World Reportface=-Italic; face=+Superscript; 1face=-Superscript; also provides a ranking of economics departments by field. Their ranking is based on survey responses of department chairs who were asked to rank all departments on a five-point scale. Department rankings by field can also be found on the EconPhd.net website (http://www.econphd.net). This site ranks departments by field, using publications in 63 highly ranked economics journals during the 1993-2003 period. The data we used as the basis for this article are more comprehensive and cover a larger time frame. We used all journals in which economists at the Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States had published during a 20-year period. Our data set consists of publications in 254 journals over the 20-year period 1985-2004. This analysis provides by far the most detailed, complete ranking of departments by field in the literature.

In addition to simply identifying the top 20 schools in each field, other information, not found elsewhere, is provided on the relative importance of the field at the school and how the scholarly output is distributed across the department’s faculty. To measure the concentration of faculty in a field, we calculate a Herfindahl- Hirschman Index (HHI). The HHI is particularly important for an undergraduate to consider. Planning to obtain a Ph.D. from a school in hopes of studying with a single person is a risky undertaking not only because the faculty member may move but also because any single faculty member can mentor only a limited number of students.

We recognize that ranking departments is fraught with danger. Thursby (2000) has pointed out that using single measures of department productivity suggests differences between many departments that are meaningless, a finding we reiterate when solely aggregate measures of performance are used. However, by providing detailed information on departments by field and by identifying the publication patterns of the faculty within the field, we are able to highlight some differences that aggregate measures gloss over.

face=+Bold; 2. Methodsface=-Bold;

Similar to Tschirhart (1989), the data-gathering stage consists of four basic steps: (i) identifying all Ph.D.-granting institutions in economics as of the 2004 spring semester,face=+Superscript; 2face=-Superscript; (ii) identifying all tenure-track or tenured faculty as of the 2004 spring semester, (iii) acquiring a list of faculty publications, and (iv) determining the quality of each publication.

To identify the universities offering doctoral degrees in economics, we used the website maintained by the University of Albany.face=+Superscript; 3face=-Superscript; This site contained a list of all economics departments with Ph.D. programs at American and Canadian universities and was verified with face=+Italic; Peterson’s Guide to Graduate Schoolsface=-Italic; .face=+Superscript; 4face=-Superscript; Based on this, we identified 129 programs located in the United States that offered doctoral degrees in economics as of the spring of 2004.

The second step, identifying all tenure-track or tenured faculty for each university, was accomplished by accessing economics department Web sites. A slight shortcoming of this approach is that faculty lists are highly dependent on whether a department maintains and updates their faculty lists. Removing faculty members without any publications resulted in over 2600 faculty names. In the few cases where faculty appeared on multiple department websites, we included the faculty member in the department where he or she had a permanent and current affiliation. We recognize that there are some faculty who are members of a department other than economics (e.g., the Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Northwestern University) yet contribute to the education of graduate students and are productive in the field of economics. Determining who these faculty are and the extent to which they are involved in the economics department made it impractical to include them in the analysis.

The third step focused on acquiring journal publications for each faculty member listed in the face=+Italic; Journal of Economic Literatureface=-Italic; database Econlit. The database was queried for the publications of tenure-track faculty identified by the 129 departments. Faculty were dropped from the analysis if Econlit indicated that they had no published articles. This study focused on articles published between 1985 and 2004. Over this time period, Econlit cataloged over 38,000 publications of faculty who were employed in Ph.D. economics programs as of the spring of 2004.face=+Superscript; 5face=-Superscript; Further, Econlit provided four essential pieces of information that would be needed for analysis: (i) article source, (ii) page numbers, (iii) number of authors, and (iv) face=+Italic; Journal of Economic Literatureface=- Italic; subject codes. The article source would be needed in order to assess the quality of the article. The credit each author received for a publication was weighted by the number of authors and page length. The greater the number of coauthors, the less credit assigned to each coauthor, and the greater the length of the article, the greater the credit assigned to each coauthor.face=+Superscript; 6face=-Superscript; The subject codes would be needed to sort articles by a field of expertise.

The final step was assigning a quality index, face=+Italic; Qface=+Subscript; jface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; , to each journal. We used both the impact factors published in the 2004 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI scores) and rankings based on "citations per character in 1990" for articles published between 1985 and 1989 (JEL scores) proposed by Laband and Piette (1994).face=+Superscript; 7face=-Superscript; Many publications contained at least one or both an SSCI and a JEL score. There were 107 journals containing both an SSCI and a JEL score. There were an additional 131 with only an SSCI score and an additional 16 with only a JEL score. Thus, the total number of journals indexed in the SSCI that we used in our analysis was 238, and the total number of journals indexed in the JEL that we used in our analysis was 123. Publications that had neither an SSCI nor a JEL score were dropped from the analysis. It should be noted that although the SSCI indexes 172 journals in the economics discipline, we use all publications identified by Econlit and indexed in the SSCI, even if outside the economics discipline, in calculating productivity. Following Tschirhart (1989), articles were adjusted by number of authors and page length. The first step consisted of dividing the number of pages of article face=+Italic; iface=-Italic; , face=+Italic; pagesface=+Subscript; iface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; , by the number of authors (face=+Italic; nface=-Italic; ), thus ensuring that each author received 1/face=+Italic; nface=-Italic; credit times the number of pages. The second step consisted of taking the value from the first step (face=+Italic; pagesface=+Subscript; iface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; divided by face=+Italic; nface=- Italic; ) and dividing it by the average length of all articles from the same journal face=+Italic; jface=-Italic; (face=+Italic; pface=+Subscript; jface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; ). The weighting that each coauthor of article face=+Italic; iface=-Italic; in publication face=+Italic; jface=-Italic; , face=+Italic; Wface=+Subscript; ijface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; , receives is given by (Forumla omitted. See article image.) The quality, face=+Italic; Qface=+Subscript; jface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; , of each article was then multiplied by face=+Italic; Wface=+Subscript; ijface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; , yielding a productivity value, face=+Italic; Pface=+Subscript; ijface=- Subscript; face=-Italic; , indicating the weighted quality assigned to each article assigned to the author. These weighted productivity values were summed by individual and then by school. The results presented in this study are based primarily on the SSCI scores because of the broader coverage of the SSCI and because the SSCI includes many of the newer journals that began publication after 1985.

In preparing to rank schools by subject fields, the JEL classification system was used.face=+Superscript; 8face=- Superscript; The JEL classification system consists of 18 different subject fields. We eliminated one subject field, M (business administration and business economics, marketing, and accounting). The remaining 17 subject fields are listed in Table 1. The subject field with the greatest number of faculty publications was D, microeconomics, and the field with the least number of faculty publications was JEL code B, methodology and history of economic thought.

face=+Bold; Table 1face=-Bold; The JEL Classification System for Journal Articles (Table omitted. See article image.)

face=+Bold; 3. Resultsface=-Bold;

After gathering and cleaning the data and making the previously mentioned calculations, rankings are computed. The results are presented in Tables 2 and 3.

face=+Bold; Table 2face=-Bold; Overall Rankings for Ph.D.- Granting Institutions in Economics (Table omitted. See article image.)

face=+Bold; Table 3face=-Bold; Field Rankings (based on first- listed JEL code for publications)face=+Superscript; aface=- Superscript; (Table omitted. See article image.)

The second column of Table 2 provides the overall productivity rank of all 129 departments. This ranking was computed by summing face=+Italic; Pface=+Subscript; ijface=-Subscript; face=-Italic; for each university, with the top university having the greatest overall productivity sum. Although it is similar to rankings found in Graves, Marchand, and Thompson (1982) and Dusansky and Vernon (1998), some differences are apparent. These differences can be attributed to the difference in time periods analyzed, the inclusion of all articles listed in Econlit rather than a subset, and the use of the SSCI for the quality index.

The third column in Table 2, "face=+Italic; Zface=-Italic; – Score," indicates the number of standard deviations the school’s productivity rank is above or below the mean productivity rank. Only 44 of the 129 schools have a positive face=+Italic; Zface=-Italic; – score, indicating that the distribution of overall productivity is skewed to the right. A noticeable feature of this skewness is that distinction between schools diminishes as the rank declines. For example, the top-ranked school, Harvard, has a face=+Italic; Zface=- Italic; -score of 5.08, and the fifth-ranked school, Yale, has a face=+Italic; Zface=-Italic; -score of 2.18, a substantial difference. However, as we move lower in the rankings, the 70th- ranked school, the University of Massachusetts, has a face=+Italic; Zface=-Italic; -score of -0.43, and the 80th-ranked school, the University of Delaware, has a face=+Italic; Zface=-Italic; -score of -0.50, a very small difference. The ordinal rankings presented in much of the literature that ranks economics departments miss the fact that below a relatively small group of top programs, the differences in aggregate productivity become fairly small.

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 face=+Italic; Journal of Economic Literatureface=-Italic; . 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: (Forumla omitted. See article image.) where face=+Italic; sface=-Italic; represents the productivity share of the face=+Italic; iface=-Italic; th 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.face=+Superscript; 9face=-Superscript;

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.face=+Superscript; 10face=-Superscript; 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.face=+Superscript; 11face=-Superscript; 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.

Table 3 identifies the field rankings for each of the 129 departments using the first JEL code identified by the author. All articles were assigned to a field on the basis of the assumption that the first JEL code listed represents the primary subject field of the article. Once an article was categorized, the productivity value for each article, face=+Italic; Pface=+Subscript; ijface=- Subscript; face=-Italic; , was summed by subject and university, yielding a total productivity score within a particular field for a particular department. While this information is useful to potential graduate students and others, it should be noted that not all fields are offered at each university. Thus, potential graduate students should confirm that a field of interest is available at a particular university before applying.

Table 4 identifies the top 20 schools in each field. This table also identifies the number of faculty in each school who publish in the field regardless of where they publish or whether the journal is listed in the SSCI. Table 4 also shows the HHI for each of the top 20 schools in the field. For example, referring to Carnegie Mellon University, the value for the HHI in general economics and teaching (JEL subject code A) is 0.18, whereas for Cornell University the HHI is 1.0. At Carnegie Mellon, publication in this field is spread out among the eight members of the faculty who publish in this area. At Cornell, however, all the publications listed in SSCI are attributed to a single faculty member. (Although at Cornell, three people have published in this area, only one person has published in journals listed in the SSCI.) As another example, for JEL subject code I (health, education, and welfare), Stanford University has nine faculty members who have published in this area and an HHI of 0.63. Michigan State University is ranked slightly lower than Stanford and has 10 faculty publishing in the area with an HHI of 0.16. If a student wishes to pursue a graduate degree in economics at Stanford University with an emphasis in health, education, and welfare, he or she should realize that the scholarly activity in this area at Stanford is concentrated in a few of the nine people who publish in the area, while at Michigan State University, the publications are more evenly distributed across the faculty in this area. face=+Bold; Table 4face=-Bold; Subject Field Rankings for Ph.D.-Granting Institutions in Economics (Table omitted. See article image.)

The fifth column in Table 4, "Importance Index," demonstrates the importance of a particular field for a department relative to its overall productivity. The importance index simply divides a department’s productivity score for a particular field by the department’s overall productivity score. Refer to Princeton University, which ranks as the top department in JEL subject codes B and F, methodology and history of economic thought and international economics, respectively. For methodology and history of economic thought, Princeton has an importance index of 2%, and for international economics, Princeton has an importance index of 12%. This indicates that methodology and history of economic thought is more likely a spillover category and not the primary focus of the department’s overall research agenda.

face=+Bold; 4. Conclusionface=-Bold;

The primary objective of this article is to provide information to undergraduate students and to their advisers on the research strengths of 129 economics doctoral programs in the United States. We provide both total and average, or per capita, research productivity measures for publishing faculty and identify schools that are highly ranked in the many different subject fields of economics.

A noticeable feature of our total productivity rankings is that the distinction between schools diminishes as their rank declines. The data demonstrate that per capita and total productivity measures result in differences in quality rankings, where total productivity is influenced by both the number of publishing faculty and the productivity of each faculty member. Students searching for graduate schools may benefit from considering both the average quality of the faculty and the total quality of the department.

For students who have a strong interest in a specific subject field of economics, we identify the schools that may best fit with the student’s desires. As a cautionary note, we provide HHI measures that alert students to the possibility that some departments may have a top reputation in a subject field due to having a single, very influential faculty member.

Although this information should be helpful to students applying to graduate school, applicants should be mindful of several things. First, one should apply to many different Ph.D. programs. The loss from a redundant application is much smaller than the loss of not applying to a place that could become one’s best offer (or maybe help to get a better deal elsewhere). Second, although a student will benefit by attending a university ranked highly in his or her preferred field, a major consideration should still be the overall quality of the department. There are several benefits of attending a highly ranked school: (i) a student often learns a lot from his or her classmates, who perhaps are better students; (ii) students may change their preferences during their studies, and our study shows that highly ranked departments overall are strong in many fields; and (iii) students may be more successful in their job search if they graduated from a department that is highly ranked overall. While this article can be a useful tool to start with, when actually choosing between competing offers, prospective students should check out department websites and relevant curricula vital themselves.face=+Superscript; 12face=-Superscript;

Finally, our work shows that many top-ranked programs based on total productivity measures are able to provide an education that is broad in nature and that gives access to many of the subject fields of economics. For students who are interested in a specific subject field, attending a traditionally top-ranked program will likely not limit the student’s ability to conduct future research in an applied discipline. At the same time, however, for students who will not attend a top-ranked school based on total productivity measures, they will likely attend a program with actively publishing faculty, and if they choose their programs correctly, it will still be possible to obtain a top-ranked education in one of the subfields of economics.

1. Available at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/ phdhum/phdhumindex_brief.php (July 2007).

2. Departments offering doctorates in agricultural economics were not included in the analysis.

3. Available at http://www.albany.edu/econ/eco_phds.html (July 2007).

4. Available at http://www.petersons.com/graduate_home.asp?path = gr.home (July 2007).

5. Coauthors listed as "et al." rather than by name in Econlit are not identified specifically by Econlit.

6. Articles with four or more authors or in articles where coauthors are not specifically identified (i.e., et al.) are treated as having four authors.

7. An alternative to using impact factors is to use total citations per journal per year. We chose to use impact factors to be consistent with past research (e.g., see Tschirhart 1989).

8. In 1991, JEL modified its classification system. We followed the JEL recommendations in mapping pre-1991 subject codes to post- 1991 subject codes (face=+Italic; Journal of Economic Literatureface=-Italic; 1991).

9. It should be noted that in the case of an HHI of 1.0, more than one faculty member may publish in this area, yet because other faculty members’ publications may not be indexed in the SSCI, they are not recognized in our data as contributing to the department’s research productivity.

10. The field strength index measures only the department’s relative productivity in its top field. It is possible that a department has a higher field strength rating in a field other than its top field.

11. These data were acquired by calling and e-mailing the graduate advisers or the department administrators at each university. In some cases, multiple attempts were made to contact the department and acquire this information.

12. We thank an anonymous referee for pointing out these cautionary notes.

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