“It is nearly impossible to be a top university without a first-rate economics department.” Columbia University’s president Lee Bollinger is reported to have said this in a news article chronicling the rise of the Economics Department at Columbia in the early 2000s. In this short note I seek to investigate if there is evidence for this claim. The results show that there is a large correlation between being a good university and having a good Economics department — more so than having a good department in a large fraction of other fields.
Paper [May 2016]
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