Snow-white in the land of the rattlesnakes: evaluation of an evaluator

This is a comment on a ranking of German economics departments published by a semi-official institution, the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE). It is shown that the CHE ranking is highly misleading because the publication output is not weighted according to quality. The CHE ranking is compared to the results of four recent ranking studies commissioned by the European Economic Association (EEA) and an earlier ranking of German, Austrian and Swiss economics departments. For the readers from Austria and Switzerland we include in the appendix a "peek preview" of the "EEA rankings" which includes the top-ranked Austrian and Swiss departments.