Volume 9, Issue 3

The Handelsblatt Ökonomen-Ranking is as yet the best privately provided ranking of individual economists and entire economics departments in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. It is, however, not suited for management purposes because the employed evaluation method gives rise to dysfunctional incentives. The research productivities derived by the Handelsblatt method, moreover, turn out to be biased. The Committee for Research Monitoring of the Verein für Socialpolitik makes use of an established bibliometric method that is not afflicted with these shortcomings. We show how selected results are altered when instead of the standard method various aspects of the Handelsblatt method are applied.

This article presents an update of the ranking of economics journals by the invariant method, as introduced by Palacio-Huerta and Volij (2004), with a broader sample of 261 journals. By comparison with the two other most prominent rankings it also proposes a list of “target journals,” ranked according to their quality, as a standard for the field of economics. It appears that economics is still the dominant discipline, but finance has caught up.

This article constructs several meta-indexes of journal rankings from existing journal rankings which all have limited coverage. It is applicable both for researchers in the field of economics and business administration (including their respective subfields) and includes also journals which are published in German. We discuss the relative merits of meta-indexes based on peer assessment and on citations.

In this article we describe and analyze the career paths of academic economists employed at German universities.We construct a unique data set combining information from publicly available sources and a web-based poll. The data set covers CV information of 583 individuals that are either tenured or in their post-doc phase. This allows us to document and to analyze patterns of typical career paths and the changes of these patterns over time.

Researchers in Germany have nowadays access to confidential microdata compiled from official statistics in a way that could not have been dreamt of just a few years ago. This article describes the new institutions that grant data access - most importantly the research data centers located inside the data producing agencies - and how to access the micro data, and presents information about selected recently released data sets with a high potential for scientific research and policy evaluation. Furthermore, we contrast the German situation with the Danish way of handling research access to confidential micro data. Finally, we take a look at ongoing projects that will further improve data access in Germany.

Climate policy is the field where economists have a prime opportunity to polish their image of being dismal scientists. Economic analysis shows that the difficulties in fighting global warming are overwhelming. Attempts to coordinate greenhouse gas reductions internationally are undermined by powerful free rider incentives. Moreover, if some countries, against all odds, succeed in agreeing on a climate treaty the success is jeopardized by the leakage effect. Doesn’t economic theory provide any basis for optimism? This article digs up some hopeful aspects. Among those are risk aversion and induced technical progress.