How do rankings affect demand? This paper investigates the impact of college rankings, and the visibility of those rankings, on students’ application decisions. Using natural experiments from U.S. News and World Report College Rankings, we present two main findings. First, we identify a causal impact of rankings on application decisions. When explicit rankings of colleges are published in U.S. ...

Rankings of journals and rankings of scientists are usually discussed separately. We argue that a consistent approach to both rankings is desirable because both the quality of a journal and the quality of a scientist depend on the papers it/he publishes. We present a pair of consistent rankings (impact factor for the journals and total number of citations for the authors) and we provide an axio...

We provide a comprehensive picture of how to compare partial rankings, that is, rankings that allow ties. We propose several metrics to compare partial rankings and prove that they are within constant multiples of each other.

We examine the value of jumbo certificate-of-deposit (CD) signals in bank surveillance. To do so, we first construct proxies for default premiums and deposit runoffs and then rank banks based on these risk proxies. Next, we rank banks based on the output of a logit model typical of the econometric models used in off-site surveillance. Finally, we compare jumbo-CD rankings and surveillance-model...