CDEP‐CGEG WORKING PAPER SERIES CDEP‐CGEG WP No. 45 A Research‐Based Ranking of Public Policy Schools Elliott Ash and Miguel Urquiola January 2018 A RESEARCH-BASED RANKING OF PUBLIC POLICY SCHOOLS ELLIOTT ASH∗ MIGUEL URQUIOLA# JANUARY 5, 2018 Abstract. This paper presents research-based rankings of public policy schools in the United States. In 2016 we collected the names of about 5,000 faculty members at 44 such schools. We use bibliographic databases to gather measures of the quality and quantity of these individuals' publication output. These measures include the number of articles and books written, the quality of the journals the articles have appeared in, and the number of citations all have garnered. We aggregate these data to the school level to produce a set of rankings. The results dier signicantly from existing rankings, and in addition display substantial across-eld variation. For useful comments we are grateful to Scott Barrett, Richard Betts, Steven Cohen, Page Fortna, Merit Janow, Wojciech Kopczuk, Bentley MacLeod, Dan McIntyre, Victoria Murillo, Justin Phillips, Cristian Pop-Eleches, Wolfram Schlenker, Joshua Simon, and Eric Verhoogen. For excellent research assistance we thank Kaatje Greenberg, Sanat Kapur, and Vu-Anh Phung. All remaining errors are our own. ∗University of Warwick,
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[email protected] . 1 1. Introduction Recent years have seen an increase in the number and variety of university rankings. This growth is likely due, at least partially, to demand for information from participants in educational markets. For instance, students applying to universities might wish to see measures of their reputation, given that attending dierent schools has been shown to have a causal impact on individuals' career outcomes.1 In addition, the diversity of rankings may reect that educational institutions use many inputs to produce multiple outputs.