Ranking German Economists

CESifo Network economists master top hurdles in the international publishing sweepstakes (Illust.: A.Rapl)

Economists are fond of orderly rating all kinds of things in order to improve understanding of economic issues, draw conclusions and make forecasts. Thus, a bevy of rankings are always to hand: GDP rankings, productivity rankings, FDI rankings, trade rankings and so on. But who ranks the economists? Well, many more do than you think: it appears to be all the rage lately. In the past few weeks, Handelsblatt and Financial Times Deutschland have published rankings on economists, and RePEc, the world’s largest online repository of research papers in economics, offers it as a standard feature.

RePEc Ranking  |  Financial Times Ranking

The Handelsblatt Ranking

Last September 18th, this prestigious German business and financial newspaper published the results of a broad survey of the international research output of German-speaking economists on the basis of a limited number of journals published in English. The survey was based on an assessment of the scientific publications listed by 850 economists, including those engaged in statistics and econometrics.

Of these publications, only those were considered that were published in some 180 economics journals—out of the about 1,000 listed in EconLit—that are accorded high scientific relevance. This relevance, in turn, was determined by a list put together by French economists Combes and Linnemer as well as by the criteria of the so-called Tinbergen List. The journals were then given weights to reflect their importance and the articles were inversely weighted according to the number of authors.

Refereed scientific monographs were deliberately left out, even those published with internationally top-ranked publishing houses, as well as articles in refereed edited volumes. With few exceptions, the international journals originating from the German-speaking world were also left out.

The Handelsblatt ranking is the hitherto most comprehensive survey of publications by German economists in refereed international journals published outside the German-speaking area. While the list—contrary to the Handelsblatt assertion—does not measure research success in itself as it leaves out the monographs, it does by and large convey a mostly correct picture of publishing success in refereed international journals.

Overall, CESifo researchers performed very well in this list. Even without considering the mere network members, the CESifo researchers did quite well. Ifo President Hans-Werner Sinn (aged 58) ranks fifth in the overall lifetime-production list, slightly below Werner Hildebrand (70) and slightly above Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten (76).

The CESifo Group can be particularly proud of Kai Konrad who, with barely 45 years of age, came second before Werner Güth (62) and after Martin Hellwig (49), who topped the ranking. In addition to his post as Professor of Economics at the Free University Berlin, Konrad is the Co-ordinator of the CESifo Research Network’s Labour and Social Affairs area. As a scholar of Hans-Werner Sinn, he also spent several years at the University of Munich’s Center for Economic Research and contributed substantially to the early publications successes of the Economics Faculty of that university. Konrad is also the most productive German economist in relation to his number of years as a researcher.

Second in terms of productivity among German economists is Peter Egger (37), head of the Environment, Regions and Transportation Department at Ifo and Professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Munich. He ranks second after Patrick Schmitz (37) in terms of the number of publications in the past five years, and second after Kai Konrad in terms of publishing score per year of research.

The RePEc Ranking of German Economists Working in Germany

(jump to Financial Times Ranking)

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is the world's largest online repository of research works in economics, listing 190,000 working papers, 233,000 journal articles, 2,300 books or chapters, and some 10,000 authors.

Its rankings count among the best substantiated in the field. Unlike many other rankings that consider solely one criterion, such as the number of downloads or the number of publications in refereed journals, the RePEc ranking considers several criteria simultaneously and weights them according to impact factors. One of the most critical criteria is how often an article is cited by other economists (a strong indicator of its impact). In addition, care is taken that the resulting scores are as clean as possible, for instance by counting different versions of the same work only once and excluding self citations.

According to the RePEc list, fully 11 of the top 20 German economists working in Germany are members of the CESifo Research Network. Click here to see the list.

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

The Financial Times Deutschland Ranking

Also in September, Financial Times Deutschland published the complete findings of a wide-ranging survey of German economists conducted in March and April jointly with the German Economics Association, the first such survey in 25 years. Partial results had been published in previous months. Aimed at finding out what economists think about their profession and its practitioners, in addition to what their opinion is on a range of economic policy issues, the survey revealed some interesting facets. 

For one, it was rather surprising that fully 64 percent of German economists have never practiced their craft outside their homeland. For another, John Maynard Keynes is still considered one of the most significant economists for the challenges of the 21st century, with 85.4% of opinions, hot on the heels of the 87.6% attained by Nobel laureate Paul A. Samuelson. The largest share of German economists lean towards the neoclassical theory, but despite the laboratory in experimental economics that was the former German Democratic Republic, there is still 1.4% of them who consider themselves most closely identified with the socialist/Marxist school of thought.

When asked whether they would accept a political appointment dealing with economic policy, no less than 72.9% of the more than 530 economists polled expressed their willingness to commit such a sacrifice for the common good. However, when asked whether they could imagine themselves as an economics or finance minister, less than half said yes. Presumably, this results from their preference for policy advisor positions, which raked in 73% of affirmative responses. A further 13.5% could imagine doing likewise under certain circumstances.

Regarding Germany, nearly half of the total thought the country is not overly taxed, 68.3% would like to see the power of unions curtailed significantly, and slightly over half (52.3%) are sure that pensions will have to be reduced in future. The country they consider the most suitable as an example for Germany is Sweden, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK and Finland.

And who are the most politically influential economists in Germany? Bert Rürup, who headed a commission tasked with making proposals aimed at achieving financial sustainability for the social security systems, tops the list, and Hans-Werner Sinn, whose activating social assistance proposal aimed at improving the low-skilled wage sector finds broad acceptance among his peers, comes second.

More on the survey (in German) at http://www.ftd.de/oekonomen-umfrage