Other Top Rankings
The Economics Department is also ranked extremely highly among universities in several different fields:
#8 International Finance
#11 Open Economy Macroeconomics
#12 Monetary Economics
#13 Central Banking
#13 South East Asia
#15 Information Technology
#15 Law and Economics
#17 China
#23 Entrepreneurship
#27 Evolutionary Economics
#27 Experimental Economics
#37 Education
These rankings are even more impressive given that the department only has 19 faculty members and is being compared to departments that are often twice as large. The rankings measure total productivity and are not a per-capita measure.
UC Santa Cruz’s Economics Department ranks eighth among U.S. universities in international finance, according to the latest data from RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), the largest bibliographic database dedicated to economics on the web.
Not only does the department rank high in the list as well, so does its faculty. Two of the top 100 economists on RePECs list of top authors in International Finance hail from UCSC: Michael Hutchison ranks at 45 and Michael Dooley at 70.
Hutchison has been influential in the field and is known for his practical analysis on economic issues that result from financial collapses. As Robert Fairlie, Department Chair of UCSC’s Economics department says, “he creates or identifies new and better ways to use quantitative and financial data.”
Dooley, who retired at the end of the 2014-2015 academic year, has also made notable contributions to the field as well first as an economist for the Federal Reserve System and the IMF and later with his research on economic crises at UCSC.
RePec is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 85 countries with the goal to measure research in Economics and its subfields. In addition to measuring research universities, the group also includes international organizations, monetary authorities, and central banks in its database.
As of April 2014, over 40,000 authors were registered and almost 15,000 institutions. For international finance, there are 1409 authors affiliated with the field and 1822 institutions. Top of the list for international finance is the International Monetary Fund. When looking at universities alone, Harvard ranks at number one and UC Santa Cruz’s sister school, UC Berkeley comes in at a close second.
