The RePEc accolade “does say we have some outstanding, truly world-class economists here,” says Barton Lipman, economics department chair. Photo by Mark Wainwright

When BU’s economists talk money, people pay attention.

That’s the takeaway from a ranking by RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), which in February 2014 placed BU’s economics department 9th out of 477 US institutions.

BU fared better than Dartmouth (18), Cornell (22), and Georgetown (23), while the top three spots in the list went to Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chicago.

RePEc, an international clearinghouse made up of hundreds of volunteers in 80 countries, ranks institutions based on research productivity, using factors such as how many papers a program publishes, how often abstracts are read, and how often papers are cited, explains Barton Lipman, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of economics and department chair. “This data is used to rank both individual economists and economics departments,” he says. “We have a number of very highly ranked economists—people who write a lot of important, prominent, highly cited papers—so we end up high in the rankings. In RePEc’s December 2013 individual rankings, 4 of our faculty were ranked in the top 1 percent in the world, 14 in the top 5 percent, and 22 (about half the department) in the top 10 percent.”

While Lipman is pleased, he’s careful, he says, not to “overstate the significance or meaning of any one ranking,” adding that “any ranking is going to have its flaws.” Nonetheless, the accolade “does say we have some outstanding, truly world-class economists here, economists who are recognized by their peers as doing important research and deepening our understanding of how modern economies function—or don’t function.”