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...

In many developing countries, the composition of rural households is influenced by the migration of adult household members to urban locations in search of employment. Children may be left in the care of their mother alone, or in the care of grandparents when both parents have migrated. Using...

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...

The ranking of an academic journal is important to authors, universities, journal publishers and research funders. Rankings are gaining prominence as countries adopt regular research assessment exercises that especially reward publication in high impact journals. Yet even within a...

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...

New Zealand’s academic research assessment scheme, the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF), was launched in 2002 with the stated objective of increasing research quality in the nation’s universities. Evaluation rounds were conducted in 2003, 2006 and 2012. In this paper, we employ 22...

In this paper we compare the rate of citation-capture across the social sciences and sciences, with particular attention paid to economics and its border disciplines generally located in Schools of Business. We also explore citation time-flow differences between a number of leading journals in...

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...

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...

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...