November 12, 2009

Economics web site ranks UCSC sixth in the world for research on international finance

UCSC's international finance group, including economist Michael Hutchison, is among the best in the world, according to a ranking compiled by an economics web site.

The UC Santa Cruz Economics Department was ranked sixth in the world--and fifth among all academic departments--for research in international finance, according to recent rankings compiled by Research Papers in Economics (RePEc).

RePEc, a collaborative dedicated to the dissemination of research in economics, maintains a database of working papers, journal articles, and software components by authors who register with RePEc. The rankings, compiled at the University of Connecticut, draw on the comprehensive database and are updated every month.

The only academic departments of economics that ranked higher than UCSC in the rankings are the University of Chicago (first), UC Berkeley (second), Harvard University (fourth), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (fifth). The International Monetary Fund was ranked third.

"This ranking reflects the rapid ascendancy of the international finance area, in particular, and the Department of Economics at UCSC, in general," said Sheldon Kamieniecki, dean of the Division of Social Sciences at UCSC. "We are very proud of the high-quality research and resulting prestige of our international finance faculty."

Almost 22,000 economists are registered with RePEc, and the ranking is based in part on citations that are compiled automatically from all documents in the RePEc library, noted Carl Walsh, a professor of economics. Four UCSC economists--professors Joshua Aizenman, Yin-Wong Cheung, Michael Dooley, and Michael Hutchison--are listed among the "top 5 percent of economists in international finance," added Walsh.

The RePEc database contains information on more than 585,000 items; it includes bibliographic citations for 344,000 articles from the leading journals in economics.

In 2005, UCSC's Economics Department was ranked ninth in the world in the field of international finance in a survey of more than 300 public and private research universities. That ranking was based on the research productivity of faculty as measured by scholarly publications in 63 academic journals from 1993 to 2003. The survey results were published by econphd.net, an online resource for prospective graduate students in economics.

Faculty research focuses on global economics, and the Santa Cruz Institute for International Economics (SCIIE) sponsors research, conferences, and scholarly exchanges. The campus's doctoral program in international economics awarded its first Ph.D. in 1992.