A revisionist perspective of European research in economics

The study by Kalaitzidakis et al. (Eur. Econom. Rev. 113 (1999a) 1150-1168, hereafter KMS) continues to exert significant influence on the literature that evaluates the relative publication performance of European centres of research in economics. The current paper argues that the methodology employed by KMS is deficient, and that it is not the methodology these authors intended to employ. I utilise an improved approach to revise the original rankings that relied on publication output from 1991 to 1996, and to update the relevant findings using 1997-2002 data. The revised rankings differ greatly from those reported by KMS. The results also suggest that there have been dramatic shifts in the relative ranking of the various European institutions over time. As expected, rankings are sensitive to the choice of journals considered. However, ranking sensitivity is considerably more pronounced with respect to changes in individual performance over time, than to the group of journals used to measure performance.