Research Published by Australian Economics and Econometrics Departments: 1988-93*

This paper measures an important component of the research output of economics and econometrics teaching departments, namely, the number of pages published during the period 1988-93, in journals listed by the Journal of Economic Literature. Based on page counts it is found that department rankings are similar over a broad range of journal groupings. It is also found that the median numbers of pages published by each of the groups of senior lecturers, associate professors and professors are quite small, indicating that within these groups research output is highly concentrated among a few active publishers.     

Research Productivity in Business Economics: The Case of Marketing

Abstract. The German Economic Review ( GER ) recently published a paper by Fabel, Hein and Hofmeister about research productivity in Austrian, German and Swiss universities. The authors derive the rankings of institutions and subject areas by analyzing an impressive and comprehensive dataset, which captures the research output of business administration departments. While these rankings might hold at an aggregate level, they lack face validity at a subject-specific level. This lack of validity is demonstrated in the case of marketing by analyzing the research output of the top-ranked institutions in top-ranked journals. A number of proposals to overcome these kinds of problems are provided.     

Research Productivity in Business Economics: An Investigation of Austrian,German and Swiss Universities

Abstract. We draw on a new and comprehensive dataset that collects the research output of business economists employed by Austrian, German and Swiss universities. We compute research rankings of departments and identify the leading departments in selected subdisciplines. Moreover, we investigate how institutional design and individual characteristics affect research productivity and draw some conclusions for the training of junior scientists.     

Ranking and clustering of the faculties of commerce research performance in Australia

There is a growing policy focus in Australian higher education on quantitative research performance assessment. However, most of the analysis has addressed aggregate performance at the institutional level, an approach inconsistent with recent policy emphasis on diversity among universities and one that ignores performance variations across disciplines. Using averaged and all available data for 2000–2004, cluster analysis is used to classify Australian Commerce Faculties into groups that exhibit similar research performance, measured by publication, PhD completion and secured competitive research grant funding. We also use factor analysis to generate full-multidimensional rankings within the resulting two or three clusters. It is found that in terms of total research output, with the exception of Adelaide all the Group of 8 (Go8) members plus University of Technology, Sydney and Griffith always belong to ‘Clusters A’. However, when research performance is expressed in per academic staff terms, an additional 11 universities join this same cluster. Our results additionally show that eight Australian faculties of Commerce not only possess low total research output but their per capita performance is also poor.     

Eagles and Turkeys: Human Capital Externalities,Departmental Co‐authorship and Research Productivity

Lucas (1988) hypothesised that human capital externalities explain persistent productivity growth and become manifest via interactions between workplace colleagues. Consistent with the first part of this hypothesis, Fox and Milbourne (2006) concluded that an increase in the average level of human capital in Australian economics departments raised the research productivity of departmental members. This paper tests the robustness of this finding by using a direct, rather than a proxy, measure of human capital and confirms the existence of human capital externalities within Australian economics departments. But we extend the analysis in two important dimensions. Firstly, we investigate the second part of Lucas' hypothesis by testing whether the externality becomes manifest via co‐authoring. We find no evidence that this type of interaction is associated with higher research productivity, especially for higher quality outputs. Secondly, we control for the likely endogeneity of one's peer group via instrumental variables estimation. In this case, we find that the peer group effect disappears completely for the highest quality outputs but remains for research output more broadly defined.     

RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY OF AUSTRALIAN ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS: HUMAN‐CAPITAL AND FIXED EFFECTS*

This study investigates why some economics departments in Australian universities are more research productive than others. The hypothesis is simple: research productivity depends upon the human capital of department members and the department‐specific conditions under which they work. A Tobit model is used to estimate the magnitude of the two effects. Both are found to be important. Our results help explain why a small number of departments consistently outperform the others in studies that rank Australian economics departments according to research output.     

Evaluating The Research Output Of Australian Universities' Economics Departments

This paper presents measures of the research output of Australian economics departments. Our study covers the 640 academic staff at rank Lecturer and above in the 27 Australian universities with economics departments containing eight or more staff in April 2002. We construct publication measures based on journal articles, which can be compared with weighted publication measures, and citation measures, which can be compared with the publication measures. Our aim is to identify the robustness of rankings to the choice of method, as well as to highlight differences in focus of departments' research output. A striking feature of our measures is that the majority of economists in Australian university departments have done no research that has been published in a fairly long list of refereed journals over the last dozen years. They may publish in other outlets, but in any event their work is rarely cited. Thus, average research output is low because many academic economists in Australia do not view research as part of their job or, at least, suffer no penalty from failing to produce substantive evidence of research activity.     

Ranking Australian Economics Departments by Research Productivity

This study ranks Australian economics departments according to their average research productivity during 1998–2002. The highest ranked departments are those at ANU, JCU, Melbourne, Tasmania and UWA. We also rank departments according to the variability of research productivity among their members, the assumption being that, other things being equal, the less variable is productivity within a department, the better. Research productivity is found to be highly skewed within all departments. However, in general, research productivity is more (less) evenly distributed within those departments that have relatively high (low) average research productivity.     

RANKING ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS IN TERMS OF RESIDUAL PRODUCTIVITY: NEW ZEALAND ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS, 2000–2006*

This paper utilises a human‐capital approach for ranking the research productivity of academic departments. Our approach provides rankings in terms of residual research output after controlling for the key characteristics of each department's academic staff. More specifically, we estimate residual research output rankings for all of New Zealand's economics departments based on their publication performance over the 2000 to 2006 period. We do so after taking into account the following characteristics of each department's academic staff: gender, experience, seniority, academic credentials and academic rank. The paper demonstrates that the rankings generated by the residual research approach and those generated by traditional approaches to research rankings may be significantly different for some departments. These differences are important in determining the likely efficiency impact of research assessment exercises.     

Applying input-output analysis to scenario analysis of ecological footprints

Application of input-output analysis to ecological footprints (EFs) is shifting from an ex-post static calculation toward an ex-ante scenario analysis for enhancing the policy relevance of EF analysis. This change in application prompts two issues requiring careful examination: (1) what is measured by Leontief inverses or extended environmental Leontief inverses, and (2) whether a sector's land multiplier (or compositions of land multiplier) can appropriately reflect the effect of delivering one unit of the sector's output to final demand on the required area(s) of production lands used by the sector itself and by other producing sectors whose products are contributed directly and indirectly to its production. The underlying message of these two questions is whether the assumed linear marginal relationship between a sector's output and its intermediate inputs (input-output coefficients)—a critical assumption made by W. Leontief to transform a transactions table from an accounting framework into the input-output model—can be extended to assume that the marginal relationship between a sector's output and the area of production land it uses for generating output is fixed (land-output marginal coefficient equal to average coefficient). By reviewing the literature on input-output analysis and its application to environmental issues and by theoretically and empirically examining the relation between sector output and land appropriation, this study advises against the use of land multipliers or their compositions in the EF scenario analysis.To apply the input-output model to EF scenario analysis for enhancing policy relevance with due attention to the relationship between sector output and land appropriation, this study suggests a two-stage EF calculation procedure. In the first stage, the input-output application estimates only the required raw materials (or generated pollutants) for meeting a given consumption pattern, which is the objective of environmental input-output analysis; in the second stage, the estimated amount of raw materials or pollutants is converted into land/water area, and a choice of conversion methods is suggested according to the research questions and the availability of conversion methods and required data.     

A revisionist perspective of European research in economics

The study by Kalaitzidakis et al. (Eur. Econom. Rev. 113 (1999a) 1150-1168, hereafter KMS) continues to exert significant influence on the literature that evaluates the relative publication performance of European centres of research in economics. The current paper argues that the methodology employed by KMS is deficient, and that it is not the methodology these authors intended to employ. I utilise an improved approach to revise the original rankings that relied on publication output from 1991 to 1996, and to update the relevant findings using 1997-2002 data. The revised rankings differ greatly from those reported by KMS. The results also suggest that there have been dramatic shifts in the relative ranking of the various European institutions over time. As expected, rankings are sensitive to the choice of journals considered. However, ranking sensitivity is considerably more pronounced with respect to changes in individual performance over time, than to the group of journals used to measure performance.     

基于计算实验的农业科研机构科技资源配置结构效应研究

以我国农业科研机构为研究对象,在分析农业科研机构科技资源配置结构的基础上,基于计算实验方法构建农业科研机构科技资源配置结构运行的系统动力学模型,并以1998—2014年农业科技资源数据对模型进行实证模拟。针对不同配置方案进行组合实验,仿真模拟在各种方案下产出表征变量论文和专利申请量的变化情况。研究发现,政府科技投入、农业科研机构科研人员薪酬对专利和论文产出具有显著正向作用,农业科研机构科研人员比例与结构调整、课题经费投向对论文和专利的产出较为敏感。据此,探究如何调整配置结构达到最优产出,以期为相关部门制定政策提供参考。     

The output efficiency of minority-owned banks in the United States

This study extends prior research on minority-owned banks by examining their output performance. Using a deterministic output distance function, both technical and allocative efficiency are measured. The findings indicate that, with a given set of inputs, minority-owned banks produce less outputs than a comparable group of nonminority-owned banks. Also, both minority-owned banks and nonminority-owned banks fail to allocate outputs in revenue-maximing proportions.     

基于DEA的河南地市经济发展分析

数据包络分析方法（DEA）是一种评价具有相同类型投入和产出的若干个生产或非生产部门（决策单元）相对效率的有效方法,可用于评价区域经济综合发展。运用数据包络分析方法,通过建立具体的指标体系、模型运算,对河南省18个地市的经济效益进行了实证研究。根据技术效率相对有效性和规模效率相对有效性分析结果,提出发展河南省地市经济的建议。     

The Evaluation of University Departments. A Case Study for Firenze

Over the last two decades, the interest to assess the quality of university teaching and research has considerably grown. This paper presents a study concerning the evaluation of the departments of the University of Firenze using Data Envelopment Analysis. It shows several applications with different variables choices to assess the performance both in teaching and in research activities. The reliability of the preferred specification was verified with a heuristic experiment, using different variables and a different number of variables. Particular attention is given to the problem of data availability and quality (e.g. for research output assessment).     

Organizational Cultures of Corruption

Systematic differences in the incidence of corruption between countries can be explained by models of coordination failure that suggest that corruption can only be reduced by a “big push” across an entire economy. However, there is significant evidence that corruption is often sustained as an organizational culture, and can be combated with targeted effort in individual organizations one at a time. In this paper, we propose a model that reconciles these two theories of corruption. We explore a model of corruption with two principal elements. First, agents suffer a moral cost if their corruption behavior diverges from the level they perceive to be the social norm; second, the perception of the norm is imperfect; it gives more weight to the behavior of colleagues with whom the agent interacts regularly. This leads to the possibility that different organizations within the same country may stabilize at widely different levels of corruption. Furthermore, the level of corruption in an organization is persistent, implying that some organizations may have established internal “cultures” of corruption. The organizational foci are determined primarily by the opportunities and (moral) costs of corruption. Depending on the values of these parameters, the degree of corruption across departments may be relatively uniform or widely dispersed. These results also explain another surprising empirical observation: that in different countries similar government departments such as tax and education rank very differently relative to each other in the extent to which they are corrupt. This is difficult to explain in incentive‐based models if similar departments face similar incentives in different countries.     

Misleading Rankings of Research in Business

Abstract. The attempts by Schulze and colleagues and Ritzberger to develop a joint ranking of journals for economics and business research are critically evaluated. Their lists suggest that the quality of top business journals is substantially lower than that of many economics journals. If, however, the authors of these lists do not want to claim a general superiority of one discipline (economics) over another one (business), they should give a clear indication that these lists are only applicable for economists. This warning appears to be necessary because Fabel and colleagues derive a ranking of universities and departments with respect to research productivity in business from the business research discriminating list RbR_IMP by Schulze and colleagues. While Diamantopoulos and Wagner already show a lack of face validity of these results, this article explains that the reason for this lies not only in the downgrading and also biased weighting of the business journals across subfields, but even more importantly, in a remarkable incompleteness of the database.     

AN EMPIRICAL NOTE ON CRITICAL COMMENTARY IN AUSTRALIAN ECONOMICS JOURNALS

A substantial empirical literature exists on ranking the published research output of individual academic economists and individual university Economics departments, including Australian work in Economics. However, very little corresponding effort has been directed at examining trends in the nature of published articles, and this embryonic literature is exclusively focused on a handful of top-ranked journals to the exclusion of Australian Economics journals. This note seeks to fill this gap by adopting the methodology developed by Coelho et al. (2005) in their analysis of the decline in critical commentary and applying it to Australian Economics journals for the period 1962 to 2005.     

Long run equilibria in an asymmetric oligopoly

Summary. Consider an oligopolistic industry composed of two groups (or populations) of firms, the low cost firms and the high cost firms. The firms produce a homogeneous good. I study the finite population evolutionarily stable strategy defined by Schaffer (1988), and the long run equilibrium in the stochastic evolutionary dynamics based on imitation and experimentation of strategies by firms in each group. I will show the following results. 1) The finite population evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) output is equal to the competitive (or Walrasian) output in each group of the firms. 2) Under the assumption that the marginal cost is increasing, the ESS state is the long run equilibrium in the stochastic evolutionary dynamics in the limit as the output grid step, which will be defined in the paper, approaches to zero. Received: September 19, 1997; revised: June 18, 1998     

Do focus groups and individual interviews reveal the same information for natural resource valuation?

Focus groups and individual interviews have become accepted methods used in the initial stages of valuation research. Whether focus groups and individual interviews reveal similar valuation information has not been thoroughly studied. The research tests the hypothesis that focus groups yield the same ecosystem service information as do individual interviews. The research also explores how the focus group and individual interview data might differ. The analysis shows that focus groups and individual interviews are not substitutes. They yield different information about ecosystem services and resource uses.