For a number of years, Tilburg University has been publishing a list of the top economics departments around the globe - click here. Their ranking is based on the number of publications a department has in a select list of top journals. The great thing is that one can change the journal selection and see how this affects the rankings. Chris Colvin, wanting to see how good Queen's University Belfast is at economic history, ranked departments based on economic history journals. To his surprise (and mine), we do very well. We are in the premier league in terms of economic history, and we are not that far behind Harvard and other top universities. A few more key signings (apologies for the football metaphor) and we will be close to the top. Thankfully, we have been recruiting in this area of late so we are moving up the league! Click here to learn more about economic history at Queen's.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...