Many countries have introduced research assessment exercises to help measure and raise the quality of research in their university sector. But there is little empirical evidence on how these exercises, such as the Quality Evaluation of the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) in New Zealand...

In February 2008, the Australian Government announced its intention to develop a new quality and evaluation system for research conducted at the nation’s universities. Although the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) scheme will utilize several measures to evaluate institutional...

This paper considers a new approach for ranking the research productivity of academic departments. Our approach provides rankings in terms of residual research output after controlling for the key characteristics of each department’s academic staff. More specifically, we estimate residual...

This paper considers the research productivity of New Zealand based economics departments over the period 2000 to 2006. It examines journal based research output across departments and individuals using six output measures. We show that Otago and Canterbury performed consistently well over the...

In this paper we explore the merits of utilizing citation counts to measure research output in economics in the context of a nation-wide research evaluation scheme. We selected one such system for study: the New Zealand government’s Programme-Based Research Fund (PBRF). Citations were...

Development agencies spend approximately US$400 million per year on landmine clearance. Yet many cost-benefit evaluations suggest that landmine clearance is socially wasteful because costs appear to far outweigh social benefits. This paper presents new estimates of the benefits of clearing...