Removing Size as a Determinant of Quality: A Per Capita Approach to Ranking Doctoral Programs in Finance

Rankings of finance doctoral programs generally fall into two categories: a qualitative opinion survey or a quantitative analysis of research productivity. The consistency of these rankings suggests either the best programs have the most productive faculty, or that the university affiliations most often seen in publications are correlated with institutional quality, which biases the rankings towards larger programs. The authors introduce a per capita measure of research output to evaluate finance programs in a context that removes absolute size as a variable. The results indicate that smaller programs in the field are frequently overlooked in traditional rankings.