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Assessment of Research Quality Tjalling C. Koopmans Institute 2003-2005 Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance Utrecht University May 23, 2007 Assessment of Research Quality Tjalling C. Koopmans Institute 2003-2005 Utrecht School of Economics Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance Utrecht University June 2006 Committee Professor Luc Soete (chairman) Professor Dieter Sadowski Professor Ron Martin Professor Eirik Furubotn Dr. Harry van Dalen (secretary) Title: Assessment of Research Quality Tjalling C. Koopmans Institute, 2003-2005 Utrecht University Utrecht School of Economics Faculty of Law, Economics, Governance and Organisation (REBO) May 23, 2007 Utrecht University Heidelberglaan 8 PO box 80125 3508 TC Utrecht The Netherlands Tel : +31 30 253 44 88 Fax : +31 30 253 77 52 Internet : www.uu.nl Design: Wrik (BNO) Utrecht © 2007: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers. Contents 1. Introduction 5 2. Review of the institute 7 2.1 Leadership, strategy and policy of the institute 7 2.2 Quality of the resources, funding policies and facilities 13 2.3 Academic reputation 13 2.4 Relevance 16 2.5 Reflection on the strengths and weaknesses the institute has formulated 17 2.6 Review of the prospects of the research programs 17 2.7 Overall assessment research quality of the institute 18 3. Review of master of philosophy and phd programmes 20 4. Summary and conclusions 21 5. Appendices 23 A: Program of the site visit 23 B: Evaluation protocol 24 C: List of 10 key publications 28 D: Rankings of economics institutions, countries, authors, and articles 29 6. Reaction Dean of the Faculty of Law, Economics 35 and Governance on the Research Assesment Introduction In September 2003 the University of Utrecht took the unique step by not only establishing a full-fledged economics faculty, it also took the even more daring step by explicitly stating from the start that it wanted to establish a multidisciplinary identity as a research strategy. This report is a midterm review of the process of establishing multidisciplinary economics. The pitfall of mid-term reviews of new establishments is that they may tend to lean towards the complaint that green grass is not in sight even though the seeds have just been sown. Patience is indeed a virtue in making investments. Still, no faculty really starts from scratch as a faculty can appoint experienced and enterprising faculty members who in turn may educate and attract an equally minded set of scholars. It is only the start-up costs – the hassle to organize and write a curriculum, finding a suitable accommodation, hiring faculty and administrative staff – that might initially hinder or depress research productivity. After three years it may be fair to see a glimpse of the profile of what the initiators had in mind. However, in the case of this particular assessment exercise, the Committee was requested to make an assessment at the beginning of 2007 of the research performance over the period 2003-2005, i.e. the very early period of the start of the TKI with the last year 2006 not even being included. It is hence likely that much of the growth in both volume and content of research output will be visible in 2006 and 2007 and the years to come. This fact puts a severe caveat to the way the Committee could use objective, i.e. numbers, citations and impact scores, criteria in assessing the research performance of the new Utrecht School of Economics. The Dutch universities maintain a system for quality assessment of research. The assessments are governed by the Standard Evaluation Protocol 2003-2009 for Public Research Organisations . The latter report outlines a new national evaluation system for publicly funded research in the Netherlands. Within these outlines the three main Dutch organisations responsible for publicly funded research – the universities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) – defined this protocol for practical use in all coming research evaluations conducted under their auspices. In this evaluation system all publicly funded research is evaluated once every six years. Once every three years research units will produce a self-evaluation, alternating between preparation for the external evaluation and serving as an internal mid-term evaluation. The evaluation system aims at three objectives with regard to research and research management: (1) Improvement of the quality of research through an assessment carried out according to international standards of quality and relevance; (2) Improvement of research management and leadership; and (3) Accountability to higher levels of the research organisations and funding agencies, government, and society at large. By means of this system, an external evaluation committee of experts assesses research programmes in a six-year cycle. In another three years there will be an official external review which will offer a richer set of research experience, but in the mean time the present external review can offer guidance and function as an early warning system for the Utrecht School of Economics. The formal task of the evaluation committee was stated as follows: (1) To assess against international scientific standards the quality, productivity, innovativeness, relevance and viability of the research work done at the Tjalling C. Koopmans Institute and its new research programs, in the period 2003 up and including 2005, on the basis of the Standard Evaluation Protocol (SEP). (2) Apart from this, the assignment involved as well: (a) an assessment of the relevance and viability of USE’s Mphil Multidisciplinary Economics and PhD programmes (b) an assessment of the balance between fundamental and applied research. To see the merits of multidisciplinary economics the university has sought an external review committee which has some experience in crossing the boundaries of scientific disciplines. The committee consists of four experts, including the chairman, who have expertise in the above- Tjalling C. Koopmans Institute, 2003-2005 5 mentioned areas. However, each member shares responsibility for the committee’s assessments as a whole. The following members took part in the committee: • Prof. Luc Soete, International Economic Relations and UNU-MERIT, University of Maastricht, chairman. • Prof. Eirik Furubotn, Texas A&M University, and Honorary Professor of Economics, University of Saarland • Prof. Ron Martin, Economic Geography, University of Cambridge • Prof. Dieter Sadowski, Business Economics and Public Administration, University of Trier. The university board appointed dr. Harry van Dalen (of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, The Hague and of the Department of Economics of the Erasmus University Rotterdam) as secretary of the committee. The self-evaluation report was sent to the individual committee members on January 22, 2007, exactly four weeks before the actual site visit. The site visit took place at the premises of the Utrecht School of Economics on February 22-23, 2007 and the exact programme of the site visit is listed in appendix A. The programme offered a wide variety of players within the faculty and to allow for an opportunity of non-invited members of USE to speak to the committee arrangements were made for ‘open house meeting opportunity’. None of the faculty members and other staff made use of this opportunity. The committee based its evaluation on the impressions gained from the interviews and of course the self-evaluation and complementary material (which is described in appendix B). What must be said at the outset is that the meetings conducted by the evaluation committee with faculty members and administrators of the Koopmans Institute were considered particularly useful in providing information about the new multidisciplinary program. Opinions were expressed openly, and one could not fail to obtain a clear sense of the way in which activities have been carried out, and the accomplishments that have been registered, over the past three years. 6 Assessment of Research Quality 2. Review of the institute An overall impression is that in the short time that has elapsed since the USE was formed, very positive and promising progress has been made. It is an exciting, novel – and to some extent risky – venture that has been embarked upon, not least because the very objective, to construct a ‘multidisciplinary economics’, itself begs the question of what, precisely, the latter notion means. Obviously, several challenges lie ahead, and there is much work still to be done, but the project is one that can be applauded. The committee applauded in particular the choice made by USE for multidisciplinary economics and the particular way in which this notion had been filled in. Not by expanding economic analyses to other unexpected fields and applications, highlighting the relevance of economic incentives and individual agents’ decisions, but by bringing insights of other disciplines into the economics field. At the same time the focus on institutions and in particular law, history and space as the three main multidisciplinary research areas (IHS) seemed to built quite naturally on the past research expertise of the different economic “domains” characteristic of the University of Utrecht previous economics teaching programme. The

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