RAE Ratings and Research Quality: The Case of Economics Departments

The RAE ratings, while intended for allocating research funds to UK universities, are often used as quality indicator by academics and students throughout the world. Yet the same outcome has been criticised as biased in favour of universities that are old, located in England, large and represented on the assessment panel. Although a naive approach can suggest otherwise, the RAE ratings of Economics departments in 1996 and 2001 investigated here are in quite close agreement with the profession's view of research quality as documented by independent rankings in the academic literature.