According to a new set of rankings of economics departments in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, Boston College Economics has moved into the mid-twenties among U.S. departments.

The new rankings appear in the December 2003 issue of the Journal of the European Economic Association, which is devoted to a symposium of papers that rank economics departments by various schemes. The only paper that gives rankings based on the publications of a department's current faculty (that is, the stock of research human capital in the department) is "Where are the economists who publish? Publication concentration and rankings in Europe based on cumulative publications" by Pierre-Philippe Combes and Laurent Linnemer. In the Combes-Linnemer rankings, a department is ranked according to the journal articles published over the five-year period 1996-2000 by the current members of its faculty.

Combes and Linnemer provide several different rankings. One is essentially an updating of the Dusansky-Vernon (1998) rankings of U.S. economics departments (in which BC ranked 35th), with European universities included. This ranking uses the same journal weights as Dusansky-Vernon, with only a small number of elite journals receiving any positive weight. BC's ranking under this weighting scheme is 28. Four of the departments ahead of BC are European, and all of the departments ahead of BC are larger. When this ranking is adjusted for size, BC moves up to 22, this time with 3 European departments more highly ranked.

In a second ranking that Combes and Linnemer provide, every scholarly journal in the American Economic Association's EconLit database is assigned some positive weight, but the weights vary across journals by as much as twelve-fold. Under this weighting scheme, BC Economics ranks is 34, with eight of the more highly-ranked departments being European. When this ranking is size-adjusted, BC Economics' rank rises to 16, and in a size-adjusted US-only ranking, BC ranks 12th.

A list of recent publications of BC Economics' faculty members may be found on this web site.