Search

The German Economic Review ( GER) recently published a paper by Fabel, Hein and Hofmeister about research productivity in Austrian, German and Swiss universities. The authors derive the rankings of institutions and subject areas by analyzing an impressive and comprehensive dataset, which captures the research output of business administration departments. While these rankings might hold at an aggregate level, they lack face validity at a subject-specific level. This lack of validity is demonstrated in the case of marketing by analyzing the research output of the top-ranked institutions in top-ranked journals. A number of proposals to overcome these kinds of problems are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the results of the literature on the ranking of centers of excellence in economics. There are two objectives: (1) to examine the evolution during the 1990s of certain features of economics research—such as the gap that exists between the US and the rest of the world, the dominant position of the UK within Europe, and the low productivity of economic scholars everywhere—and (2) to document the significant progress that Spanish research institutions have experienced during this period. Results by several broad fields of specialization are summarized here for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]