Today’s post on Mankiw’s blogalerted me to a ranking of econ departmentsthat I’ve never seen before. Notice that Mankiw lists this ranking first, followed by US News ranking, which focuses on graduate programs specifically, as opposed to departments in general.

Here are the top 10 according to IDEAS (and their score):

1          1.1 Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA)

2          3.11 Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (USA)

3          3.98 Department of Economics, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, California (USA)

4          3.99 Department of Economics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (USA)

5          4.22 Economics Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA)

6          4.48 London School of Economics (LSE), London, United Kingdom

7          4.95 Department of Economics, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom

8          6.59 Department of Economics, New York University, New York City, New York (USA)

9          9.15 Department of Economics, School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York City, New York (USA)

10        10.74 Department of Economics, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California (USA)

Other interesting things to note: Yale is number 27, below BU and BC; Northwestern is 15. Weird, isn’t it? I bet if you polled professors and/or graduate students, this is not the ranking they would come up with (of course, it’s also clearly not random).

Why this discrepancy with the US News and common sense? My impression is that IDEAS bases the ranking on citations by papers that are registered with it. Clearly not a comprehensive (or representative) sample.