Checking the High-Water Marks

And the winner is...

And the winner is...

This is some kind of a guilty pleasure. It is well known that economists divide Mankind into two groups: economists and non-economists. Which is to say, the best and the rest. But now comes the chance for us rest-dwellers to expose how economists themselves are divided into the best and, well, the rest. In other words, ranking time!

Economists live and die by the maxims “publish or perish” and “be cited or perish”. The first gives a quantitative measure of their performance, the second a qualitative one. Tallying these two indicators is not exactly a straightforward business, however. Lots of filters and weights must be applied if a meaningful score is to be obtained.

For instance, self-citations must be filtered out. The remaining citations must be weighted according to the importance of the journal in which the articles containing them were published. Authorship of articles having multiple authors must be allotted accordingly. Articles are weighted according to journal importance, and so on and so forth.

Then, the time span you consider is also important. The last two years? Ten? Lifetime? This is significant: citations accumulate over time, and usually some time elapses between publication of an article and the appearance of its first citations. And so on.

One of the outfits going the extra mile to generate meaningful rankings is the Research Papers in Economics network (RePEc), the world’s largest internet repository of academic economics publications. Over the years, RePEc has refined its tools and criteria for putting together rankings of authors, institutions, countries and states. By now, up to 33 different criteria are used, ranging from number of works, downloads, views and citations, through to the same indicators weighted by simple impact factors, recursive impact factors, or the same discounted by citation age, and other esoteric parameters such as the so-called Wu Index (which indicates that a researcher has published w papers, with at least 10w citations each).

While some kinks in the data remain to be filtered out, such as the distortions introduced by the discrepancy between the institutions a researcher is affiliated with and the country in which he or she actually conducts his research, the RePEc ranking remains one of the most thorough and reliable of its kind, albeit dependent on authors actually taking the time to register with RePEc: being an economist does not include you automatically in the network. This means that the ranking is necessarily imperfect, but still fairly formidable.

Below is the RePEc ranking of economists working in Germany. All those attributed by RePEc to Germany solely on account of their affiliation to a German-based network have been purged from the list. The list was compiled with the information available on the RePEc website on May 25th, 2011. The ranking results from the harmonic average of the international score according to each of the various criteria employed by RePEc, with the exclusion of number of works, best and worst score, and Wu factor. Over half of the top-25 are members of the CESifo Research Network.

If you want to see the criteria used by RePEc in constructing its author rankings, click here.

Rank
Name
Research Network
Affiliation
1
Hans-Werner Sinn
University of Munich, Ifo Institute for Economic Research
2
Klaus M. Schmidt
CESifo Network
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
3
Martin F. Hellwig   Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
4
Gerard J. van den Berg   University of Mannheim
5
Armin Falk
CESifo Network
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
6
Frank Rafael Smets
CESifo Network
European Central Bank, Frankfurt
7
Urs Fischbacher
University of Konstanz
8
Dennis Snower
Kiel Institute for the World Economy, University of Kiel
9
Klaus F. Zimmermann   Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn; DIW, Berlin; IZA, Bonn
10
Volker Wieland
 
Goethe University,, Frankfurt
11
Ludger Woessmann
Ifo Institute, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
12
Stefan Gerlach
CESifo Network
Goethe University, Frankfurt
13
Axel Dreher
CESifo Network
Georg-August University, Goettingen
14
Marcel Fratzscher
CESifo Network
European Central Bank, Frankfurt
15
Holger Görg
 
Kiel Institute for the World Economy
16
Benny Moldovanu
 
University of Bonn
17
Joachim Wagner
 
Leuphana University of Lüneburg
18
Michael Ehrmann
 
European Central Bank, Frankfurt
19
Reinhard Selten
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn
20
Michael Christopher Burda
Humboldt University, Berlin
21
Helmut Bester
 
Free University Berlin
22
Kai A. Konrad
Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance
23
Axel Ockenfels
University of Cologne
24
Wolfgang Karl Härdle
 
Humboldt University, Berlin
25
Juergen von Hagen   Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn


Note: This text is the responsibility of the writer (Julio C. Saavedra) and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of either the CESifo Research Network Members cited or of the CESifo Group Munich.

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