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Econ Department's Reputation Mounts
Economists, from left:
Dr. Rati Ram,
Dr. James Payne, and
Dr. Rajeev Goel
The Department of Economics received national recognition recently from two disciplinary sources. The Department was ranked 5th in the nation for teacher quality and productivity—accompanying such schools as Indiana, Purdue, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Wisconsin-Madison—according to a study by two assistant professors of economics at the University of Southern Mississippi. In "Ranking Institutions Based on Economic Education Scholarship," Melody Wo and M.C. Sunny Wong construct a ranking of economics departments worldwide based on teaching quality, measured by the number research contributions to the Journal of Economic Education—the leading education journal in the discipline. "We assume that schools with greater contributions to the economic education literature have a comparative advantage in teaching economics," said Wo and Wong. “Such recognition is a testament to the Department’s commitment to undergraduate education,” said Department Chair James Payne.

 

 

The Department received additional honors when three faculty members—Dr. Rajeev Goel, Dr. James Payne, and Dr. Rati Ram—were recognized for their scholarly contributions, making the list of the Top 400 most prolific economists in the world from 1990-2000. In addition to the Top 400, Ram was ranked in the top 300 for publications from 1969-2000 and for number of citations from 1975-2000. "We are extremely proud of the Economics Department," said Dean Olson. "The Department has achieved an admirable balance between excellence in teaching and scholarly research."

Goel is author of a recent book, Economic Models of Technological Change. His research in industrial organization, energy economics, economics of corruption, and applied microeconomics appears in numerous academic outlets, including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Managerial and Decision Economics, Research Policy, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and The Energy Journal.

Payne’s research in applied time series econometrics, financial economics, and macroeconomics appears in numerous academic outlets, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Macroeconomics, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Southern Economic Journal, and Economics Letters. Professor Payne was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, Croatia, and serves as co-editor for the Journal of Economics and Finance.

Ram’s research on economic development, Human Resources, and Cross-Country Studies has appeared in numerous leading journals including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. Professor Ram was an invited contributor to the Handbook of Defense Economics, has coauthored with Nobel Laureate T. W. Schultz, and has refereed for fifty professional journals. He advised UNESCO on the development of World Education Indicators and the World Education Report (1995).

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