Economics Departmental Rankings: Comment.

In the 1982 issue of "The American Economic Review," Philip Graves, James Marchand and Randall Thompson (G-M-T) provide a ranking of economics departments in the United States based on page counts of articles published during 1974-78 in twenty-four leading journals. The purpose of this comment is to update the G-M-T rankings, based on publications from 1978 through spring 1983. They also provide rankings for the top forty economics departments outside the United States. Finally, the authors compare concentration ratios measuring the dispersion in published pages among U.S. departments between the 1974-78 and 1978-83 periods. In order to ensure comparability, the authors rank departments using the same method as did G-M-T. No simple methodology can capture accurately the many dimensions which comprise research quality. Rankings are based on AER-standardized page counts in the twenty-four leading journals used by G-M-T.