Research output in New Zealand economics departments 2000-2006: a stock approach.

1. Introduction

In this paper we utilize the stock approach to explore the research productivity of New Zealand's university-based economics departments over the period 2000 to 2006. In doing so, we examine research output across departments and among individual researchers. Our findings suggest that there is a surprising degree of stability in departmental rankings across the six output measures employed in this study. Nevertheless, there are differences in rankings based on the relative weights given to quality and quantity dimensions of output; this is especially so for Auckland, Victoria and Waikato. On the other hand, Otago and Canterbury perform well under all our output weighting schemes, and on the assumption that all weighting schemes are of equal value, Otago is the overall 'winner'. The issue of 'who is in, and who is out' is of critical importance, especially for Auckland. We explore this matter in some depth, and in a more general manner, we address the role of research stars in the New Zealand setting. (1)

2. Literature Review

Economists have had a long-standing interest in matters of productivity and the efficiency of resource use, and therefore, it is not surprising that there is extensive literature on the relative performance of economics departments, especially with respect to research output. Much of the early work was carried out in the USA, and the starting point for the present day measurement approach is generally deemed to be the pioneering work of Liebowitz and Palmer (1984). This was the first work to generate a set of weights based on citation counts. It should be noted that Liebowitz and Palmer went well beyond merely counting citations for various journals: they adjusted for self-citations, age and size of journal, and developed a method for weighting citations to generate a set of impact factors.

Liebowitz and Palmer's work was updated by Laband and Piette (1994) to generate rankings for 106 journals based on 1990 citation counts. They extended Liebowitz and Palmer's approach by adjusting for page size differences between journals. The LP weighting scheme is still used for output weighting purposes (Sinha, Macri and McAleer, 2007; Macri and Sinha, 2006; Coupe, 2003). An alternative weighting scheme was developed by Mason, Steagall and Fabritius (1997). They surveyed economics department chairs at 965 universities in the USA in late 1992 and early 1993; they received replies from 216 heads, and used the resulting information to construct a set of weights for 157 journals. This reputations-based weighting scheme also continues to be used today (Sinha, Macri and McAleer, 2007; Macri and Sinha, 2006; Coupe, 2003).

Since the mid-1990s, research ranking studies have been undertaken in a number of countries and regions (for a thorough review of such studies, see Macri and Sinha, 2006). However, aside from the USA, the most extensive work has taken place in Australia. For purposes of this paper, we shall focus on the Australian literature, since much of the output measurement work for New Zealand has resulted from research by Australian-based authors or by New Zealand researchers using Australian work as a departure point. It is generally agreed that the first major work in Australia was undertaken by Harris (1988); he attempted to measure departmental research output by constructing a set of arbitrary weights covering a wide range of outputs: books, monographs, journal articles, and conference papers. (2) Harris (1990) followed up this work by extending his methodology to include citation counts. Although his work was pioneering in nature, and extensive in scope, it was properly criticized for being based on a set of highly arbitrary weights, and for not adequately reflecting quality differences between journals.

Subsequently, Towe and Wright (1995) utilized the work of Laband and Piette (1994), Diamond (1989), Hall (1987), and Hill and Murphy (1994), to construct a four-tier weighting scheme. Towe and Wright somewhat arbitrarily placed 12 journals in Group 1, 11 journals in Group 2, and 48 journals in Group 3. All other journals listed in the 1994 EconLit data base were assigned to an 'other' category, and deemed to be Group 4 journals. It should be noted that Towe and Wright derived page correction factors for all 71 journals in Groups 1 to 3; that is, they standardized journal page size relative to an average AER page. They then derived total and per capita output rankings for 23 Australian economics and 5 econometric departments for various combinations of their 4 quality groupings. Towe and Wright consider rankings over various combinations of quality groups without giving weights to the different groups.