Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the convention in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been a first author more...

Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the conven-tion in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Pro-fessor A, who has been a first author more...

This paper examines three related puzzles: 1) Why do US universities dominate the global rankings? 2) Within US universities, why is Harvard University usually ranked at the top? 3) While most universities take centuries to acquire a global reputation how have many US universities leapfrogged to...