The Department of Economics and Finance within the College of Business and Economics has been ranked among the top institutions worldwide for research output by Research Papers in Economics (RePEc). RePEc released its most recent rankings in June, comparing more than 6,000 institutions around the globe. The department is in the top five per cent.

“The most recent RePEc rankings confirm the high level of economics research that takes place at the University of Guelph,” said Stephen Kosempel, chair of the Department of Economics and Finance. “We have been in the top five per cent of institutions worldwide for years and have been moving up. The current ranking reflects our ongoing contribution to research in the broad range of fields that belong to economics.”

The recent rankings see the University of Guelph’s economics and finance research output in the top 4.2 per cent in the world. Within the graduate program category, it is ranked in the top 2.7 per cent. The graduate program ranking is measured by aggregating scores of graduates in the same way that rankings of institutions are computed. In particular, it reflects the total stock and quality of the research output produced by graduates of the university’s PhD program in economics.

“Our program is still relatively new, but it has been very successful, in that a large number of our graduates have obtained academic positions in Canada and abroad,” Kosempel added. “Our program ranking is therefore a reflection of their success.”

RePEc is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 85 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers.