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Dutch Economists Top 40

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Abstract

There is a tradition in the Netherlands to publish an annual ranking of economic and business researchers working in Dutch universities. The most recent such ranking, published in 2013, emphasizes research quantity over research quality. We propose an alternative ranking based on quality. Important information about a researcher’s quality and impact is lost when moulding it to fit a template of numbers. Our ranking is no exception. Nevertheless, we argue and demonstrate that our ranking fits international consensus on research prominence and that the 2013 ranking does not.

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Notes

  1. See Van Ours and Vermeulen (2007) for a short history. Economists are ranked in other countries as well; see for example Dolado et al. (2003) and Bauwens (2007).

  2. Earlier ranking procedures to generate a Dutch economists top 40 have also been criticized. Van Ours and Vermeulen (2007), using 2006 top 40 data, show that a quality oriented ranking generates substantially different results than a quantity oriented ranking.

  3. We could have taken many other journals for comparison. We chose Economics Letters because it is well known and many scholars in the ESB data base have published in it. The implication is not that one journal is good and the other is bad, but rather that by design they have very different impacts on research and field knowledge and that the AIS captures this better than the PRS.

  4. We are indebted to Sandra Phlippen for letting us use the data compiled for the ESB ranking.

  5. In particular, we screened on publications in the top five general interest journals: the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.

  6. This is a direct example of how the system responds to the rules.

  7. A few publications in the ESB data base had multipe classifications such as “Article; Proceedings Paper” or “Article; Book Chapter”. These publications were treated as articles.

  8. We comment below on the ranking with a more inclusive list.

  9. See https://www.aeaweb.org/honors_awards/clark_medal.php.

  10. The last five John Bates Clark Medal winners were Raj Chetty in 2013, Amy Finkelstein in 2012, Jonathan Levin in 2011, Esther Duflo in 2010, and Emmanuel Saez in 2009.

References

  • Bauwens, L. (2007). A new method to rank university research in economics in Belgium. Mimeo: CORE.

  • Dolado, J. J., Garcia-Romero, A., & Zamarro, G. (2003). Publishing performance in economics: Spanish rankings (1990–1999). Spanish Economic Review, 5, 85–100.

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  • Van Ours, J. C., & Vermeulen, F. (2007). Ranking Dutch economists. De Economist, 155, 469–487.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CentER, Department of Econometrics and OR, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Jaap H. Abbring

  2. CentER, Department of Marketing, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Bart J. Bronnenberg

  3. Department of Economics, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Pieter A. Gautier

  4. CentER, Department of Economics, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Jan C. van Ours

  5. Department of Economics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Jan C. van Ours

  6. CEPR, London, UK

    Jan C. van Ours

Authors
  1. Jaap H. Abbring
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  2. Bart J. Bronnenberg
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  3. Pieter A. Gautier
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  4. Jan C. van Ours
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jaap H. Abbring.

Additional information

We thank Kun Zheng for excellent research assistance.

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Abbring, J.H., Bronnenberg, B.J., Gautier, P.A. et al. Dutch Economists Top 40. De Economist 162, 107–114 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-014-9227-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-014-9227-7

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