Rankings of Finance Doctoral Programs

Because I'm one of the few bloggers who regularly write about the life of a finance professor, I get about a dozen questions a month from people considering a PhD in finance (Note: if you're interested, you can read about a finance professor's typical day here and here, and about what's involved in getting a PhD in finance here).

The emails are one of the more surprising and most enjoyable things about writing the blog, and at least a couple of the folks who've sent me questions are currently in PhD programs. I look forward to seeing how their careers progress, knowing I may have played some small part it them.

Some of the most frequent questions I get are along the lines of "How do I find out how well respected University X's finance doctoral program is?" or alternately, "Where can a get a list of rankings of finance doctoral programs?"

I should have done this some time ago, but I'm a bit slow at times. But, since Unknown Daughter and She Who Must Be Obeyed are out to a classmate's birthday party, and Unknown Son is entranced by a Harry Potter movie, this seems like a good time to spent a little time on the Almighty Google. Here are the results:

• Karolyis and Silvestrini have a piece on SSRN titled "Comparing the Research Productivity of Finance PhD Program Graduates" here
• Jean Heck has a similar piece titled "Establishing a Pecking Order for Finance Academics: Ranking of U.S. Finance Doctoral Programs here. Both it and the Karolyi/Silvestrini piece analyze productivity on the basis of the author's doctoral-granting program, but this one lists a few more doctoral programs than the other piece. So, it might yield some possibilities for those looking for less selective programs.
• Finally, Arizona State has a ranking of finance departments (which may or may not have doctoral programs) here, while EconPhD has a similar one covering several finance areas here.

Updated 3/18: A regular reader of the blog (thanks, Jeff) submitted a couple other rankings

• Chan, Lung and Wolfe have a ranking of finance departments based on "citations" (in case you're not familiar with the term, a citation occurs when one author references another in his work). So, citation counts are often used as a measure of the impact a person's work has in the larger academic community.
• The University of Texas-Dallas has a ranking of business schools (not finance departments) based on publications in a pretty wide number of journals across all business disciplines.
  

Hopefully, these will prove useful. If any of you are aware of any other rankings that are relatively recent (i.e. done in the last 4-5 years or so), let me know and I'll update the list.

A Great Review of Analyst Forecast Research

As most academics know, a good survey article is worth its weight in gold. So, here's a good one on analyst forecast research (you can send money later)

Sundaresh Ramnath, Steve Rock and Philip Shane have a piece in the 2008 International Journal Of Forecasting entitled "The Financial Analyst Forecasting Literature: A Taxonomy with Suggestions for Further Research." In it, they catalog and organize about 250 research articles on various facets of the equity analysis process done since 1992 (it builds on earlier pieces by Schipper (991) and Brown (1993)). They arrange their review into the following topics:

• How do analysts make decisions (i.e. what information do they use, how does their environment affect them, etc...)
• What is the nature of analysts expertise (i.e. how do you measure it, is there herding, etc...)
• Information content (how informative are analysts forecasts, is there information in forecasts over an above other available information)
• Market efficiency (how much is extant information reflected in forecasts, do stock prices reflect the info in forecasts, etc...)
• What incentives or behavioral biases affect or are present in analyst forecasts
• How does the regulatory environment affect the forecasting process
• How statistically valid are analyst forecast studies?
  

All in all, it's a very thorough piece, and I suspect it'll end up being read and cited by quite academics. In particular, I'd recommend it to grad students who are trying to get up to speed on this very broad literature.

The IJF piece is for subscribers only, but there's an ungated version on SSRN here.

HT: CXO Advisory Group.

Happy New Year

Here's wishing all of you a safe, happy, and prosperous New Year.

I've taken a few days off from working (a little blogging and a little studying for CFA but that's all). But tomorrow it's back on the hamster wheel.

Two of my revise and resubmits are coming back to me from my coauthors- both require a bit of work on my part, but not much. I also have two papers I'd like to have ready to go for the FMA submission deadline. One is with a former student and was part of her dissertation. We've been working on it for the last 3 months. The other was a pilot study another student and I did a while back with a small data set - we've now expanded the data set significantly, with a lot more analysis.

So, I'll be busy the next few weeks. It's good to get back in the saddle.

Another Crop Almost In

At the risk of sounding like Chauncy Gardner, teaching at the university level is a lot like farming - there's a definite rhythm to the semester that mimics the farming calendar. In the off season, you prepare the soil (make changes to the syllabus, do some reading for new materials in your classes, etc...). During the semester, there's planting (the first week or so), pruning and weed pulling (usually done with exams and quizzes), and finally, at the end of semester there's the harvest.

I gave my last final exam yesterday. So, the crop's almost in. Now all I have left to do is grade them (and the remaining class projects) and I'm done with teaching-related stuff for the semester.

No cracks about vegetables, please (or at least, not too many...).

But as for research in the "off season", there's a lot to do:

• I just yesterday finished my part of the work on one revise and resubmit (I'll call it R&R-1), which involved a fair bit of empirical work, and SAS programming out the yazoo. Now I can turn everything over to my coauthors, who'll do the remaining writing, and deal with the rest of the referee's comments.
  
• Since my part of R&R-1 is done, I now get to work on another R&R (R&R-2) where I get to do most of the writing (both coauthors are not native speakers of English). Unfortunately, the referee was extremely picky, so there's much to do.
  
• There's a third R&R (R&R-3) for which a coauthor is doing the first draft on the revisions (it's all writing - no new empirical work is needed). Then, he'll pass it back to me for further editing (I'm the "senior" writer on this one - the coauthor was my student previously). With luck, I'll finish R&R-2 before this one comes back to me.
• Then, there's a piece with a former colleague and a former Ph.D. student. It was sent out and soundly rejected previously. So, we (actually, the former Ph.D. student) did a lot of additional empirical work. Then the former colleague did a rewrite, and I'll get to do the final buffing and shining. Hopefully, it'll come back to me after R&R-2 is done and before R&R-3 comes back to me).
  
• Somewhere in there, there's another piece that I'm trying to finish before the FMA submission deadline. It's with another former student - we'd previously done a pilot study with interesting results. Since then, we've expanded the data set to about 5x its original size, and then ran some additional tests. If the coauthor can finish his part of the data work (mostly the coding of governance data from about 500 proxies) soon, we can write up the new results and send it off.
  
• There are a few other pieces in various stages, but I'll save discussion of them until they move out of the "vaporware" category.
  

Luckily, I have almost five weeks before the next "planting". Looks like it'll be a busy time. But that's what makes it fun.

The "Shotgun" Approach

Recently, I made a short post about a rejection we got from a journal, and noted that we'd "make a few changes and send it out to another journal". Robert Jensen (emeritus professor of accounting at Trinity University, and one of the earliest academic bloggers) picked up on this and made some very insightful comments on the research "Shotgun approach"

Most academics still actively seeking publication in research journals are playing the same game.

Think of each shotgun pellet as a research paper which in modern times is generally a co-authored paper that gives rise to more pellets (i.e., more papers) loaded into the shotgun shell. The "Shotgun Game" (my definition) is analogous to standing at one end of a football field and firing a 12-gage into the air while hoping that one or more of the tiny pellets will fall down on a target beyond the opposite goal line. At first the target is a very small Tier 1 academic journal target. There may even be several of small targets of about the same Tier 1 small size, especially when foreign journals are allowed to be targets. The game may be replayed several times with substituted Tier 1 targets until the player and/or the referees grow weary of repeated plays at the Tier 1 level. Then the player moves up to Tier 2 journals that have targets twice the size of Tier 1 journals and are, accordingly, easier (not necessarily easy) to hit. Then there are Tier 3 journals, Tier 4 journals, and on and on. Ultimately there are conference proceedings with targets that take up half a football field and are easy to hit even when played by blind researchers. Each shell fired is reloaded with pellets that missed the targets on earlier plays of the game.

Read the whole thing here (it's about a quarter of the way down, and the the easiest way to find it is to search on the page for Unknown Professor).

His comments, and those of the commenters who chime in, are pretty much on target. Unfortunately, Professor Jensen makes one mistake: he thinks I'm now tenured (I'm not yet). At my school, both the number and the quality of my publications count (unfortunately, they place more weight on numbers than quality). So, my interests are best served by getting stuff out quickly, particularly since I will likely go up for tenure in the next couple of years.

I admit, this strategy imposes some costs on the profession as a whole (particularly for the poor referees that have to read the stuff I submit). And the work I'm submitting isn't terrible - it's just admittedly not up to the standards I'd like to maintain in a perfect world. Were I aiming for tenure at a "top" research school, it definitely wouldn't be an optimal strategy.

However, here at Unknown University, quality counts within the department (quality meaning publications in either first or high second-tier journals), but numbers count within the larger college and with the Dean (yes, a Dean is someone who can't read but can count). And while Unknown Son was undergoing cancer treatment, I simply didn't have the energy to work on "big" projects. So, I started a lot of smaller things. They're not great, but they'll get published somewhere, and my dean will have things to count.

But I do hope to kick up my research in terms of quality (and I'll have to to get the tenure vote of at least one of the senior faculty in my department). I currently have three revise-and-resubmits that should all be resubmitted within the next month (unfortunately, all at lower-tier journals). Once these are off my desk, I'll have cleared out the "old" material from my research folder, and can start working on the higher-impact stuff.

We've gotten pretty strong positive signals from the editors on two of the three. So if those two hit, I could end up having 5 acceptances in my first eighteen months at the new school. Granted, they're mostly at lower-tier journals, it does give me some cover while I send out some pieces to higher-tier journals.

I agree wholeheartedly Professor Jensen that a great deal of research that gets done would be FAR better served posted on blogs or some Wiki-style forum. But the school I'm at is the one I plan on staying at (it's one of the three target schools I had when I graduated, and it took me eight years and 3 moves post-Ph.D to get here). So, I bite my lip and do what I have to to get tenure.

Nontenured faculty (particularly at lower-tier schools) have a difficult task that involves balancing two competing approaches: the "Shotgun" approach is unfortunately the optimal one for minimizing the risk of not getting tenure, and the "high quality" one (do only research that answers big questions and has a high probability of ending up in "top" journals) that most benefits the profession and makes it likely that they'll eventually end up at top research schools.

But no one ever said it would be easy.

Another Rejection Letter (Sniff!)

Just got aother rejection from a journal. I'm not all that surprised, because it was a pretty good (I think it was ranked #5 in it's area) journal and it was a stretch to send this piece there. But you never know - sometimes you catch a referee (and editor) in the right frame of mind.

Oh well, this just means we make a few changes and send it back out to another journal. I used to panic about this stuff, but I now know that most papers (if they're decently well done) eventually find a home somewhere.

I felt pretty good a couple of weeks back, since I had five pieces under review. But one of them got accepted (darn!) another came back with a revise-and-resubmit, and this one got rejected. So, I'm no longer "Mungo Compliant" - I fall short of the "three paers under review" standard. So it's time to get the R&R's off my desk and back in an editor's hands.

I have five other projects in various stages (two of them are actually somewhat completed working papers), but until they're submitted to a journal somewhere, they're nothing but vaporware.

So it's back to the academic salt mines...

Another Article Accepted!

Seems like I'm on a roll lately (it's a slow roll, but a roll nonetheless). I just heard from a coauthor that a small paper of ours just got accepted. It's at a lower-tier journal, but at least we placed it somewhere (articles are like orphans - if they keep trying, they eventually find homes). The coauthor is a former student of mine who's done pretty well for himself - he started at a lower tier school and has published well over a dozen articles in four years (mostly at lower-tier journals, but one at a top-tier journal in a related discipline and several at just-below top-tier level).

A couple of years ago, my research was just beginning to fire on all cylinders when the Unknown Son was diagnosed with cancer. Then (not surprisingly) I got almost nothing out for the next three years (I was just looking, and there's gap in my vita that's exactly three years long). But over the last year and a half, I've gotten three publications and four other papers under review. It's not an earth-shattering output, and I'd certainly like to be publishing in better-quality journals. But since I was mostly cleaning out my backlog (and some of the ideas had gone stale while The Boy was sick), I'll take it.

At the school I'm at, quality is valued but numbers count too (after all, one definition of a Dean is "a person who can count but can't read").

Now I have some cover to work on longer-term projects that have a decent chance at higher-quality journals. I was just looking at my research file and I currently have four projects under way, and hope to finish 2-3 of then by December. If I do, and I get one or two more publications by the next fall, I should have a pretty good shot at tenure.

And since the Unknown Wife has told me in no uncertain terms that we're NOT moving again, I have a lot of incentive.

Like they say down South, "If Momma Ain't Happy, Ain't NOBODY Happy!"

What I Did During (The First Part Of) My Summer Vacation

I just realized that I haven't posted anything new on the blog for about 10 days, so I thought I'd let you know that I'm still alive and haven't stopped blogging altogether. But, I did feel a bit burned out on blogging, so I took a bit of a break. Here are a few updates on the summer so far:

I've been working on a few projects. One is editing a paper I'm doing with several other people. It's a new experience for me since a good part of the paper is theory-based, and I'm an empiricist at heart. So, I've been forced to brush up on a lot of the math I haven't used since grad school. In addition, I'm the only American among the coauthors, and they're all theorists. So, I'm in charge of "englishizing" the paper (their term). Hopefully it'll be handed back to my coauthors for their part soon.

I've been working on a second project in what's also a new area for me - it ties in options implied volatility to firms' information environments. While I'm familiar with the information asymmetry literature, the options stuff is new to me. And in addition, the data set is several times larger than any I've worked with, so I had to learn a few new SAS programming tricks. But being the nerd that I am, it's actually fun.

Logging my research (actually, my "writing") time has been a humbling experience. I 've been averaging one "zero time spent" day out of every three or four, and find that I don't spend nearly as much time writing as I thought even on the days I do write. But then, that's the point of the exercise. As my accounting friends say, "you can't manage what you don't measure".

I also got one small paper submitted, so I now have 4 under review.

On the personal side, I've been cycling pretty regularly (about 5x a week on average), and have done a few hard 15-20 milers. I'm still not in top shape, but I've been able to hold just shy of a 16 mph pace for a pretty hilly 20 miler. My goal for the summer is to get up to an 18 mph pace for the 20 miler and to ride to my mother's house, which is a very hilly 80 miles away.

Other than that, I've spent my time playing with the kids, trying to grow grass on the front part of my yard, and trying to unpack some of the boxes that have been in my basement since we moved almost a year ago.

I'll get back to posting some "real" stuff in the next couple of days.

Becoming a More Productive Writer

Like most faculty I know, I could stand to be more disciplined in my writing. There are times when I'm really productive, and stretches that I don't do anything. One tactic that has been extremely helpful (at least when I use it) has been keeping a writing log. Although I've mentioned this before, it bears repeating. Robert Boice (the acknowledged master of research on faculty productivity) did quite a few workshops on faculty productivity. He did a study where participants were put into three groups

• The first group (the "control") continued as they normally did, and continued to write occasionally in large blocks of time (what I call "binge writing"). In a year's time, they produced an average of 17 pages of output
• The second group wrote daily and kept log of their time spent writing and their approximate output. In a year's time, they produced an average of 64 pages of output.
• The third group wrote daily, kept a daily log, and showed it to someone else weekly. They produced an average of 157 pages in a year!

I'm sure that there are some other issues that would effect this experiment, like self-selection. But the differences across groups are pretty striking.

So this time, to tweak things a bit, I set up a spreadsheet on Google Spreadsheets with a current student, a former student, and a regular coauthor of mine. We've all committed to record out writing time and output daily. It should be interesting--there's already been one day that I put in a half hour at 11:00 p.m. just to avoid having to show a goose egg for the day.

Ya gotta love accountability. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

update: In case you're interested, two books by Boice that are well worth picking up are Advice For New Faculty Members (the title is misleading - I got a lot out of it even 6 years out of grad school) and Professors as Writers.

It's Almost Like Being Single Again

I just got another article rejected from a journal editor. That makes two in the last month. I haven't had this much rejection in a short time since I was single (and let's NOT go there...)

This last semester I've been pretty productive in terms of finishing research and submitting it to academic journals. Unfortunately, more submissions means more rejections. I realize that it'll eventually mean more acceptances too, and that it's all part of the game. But it still stinks.

Time to patch the piece up and send it off to another journal. But that's for tomorrow. For tonightI guess I'll have to console myself with a Strongbow's and the season finale of Heroes.

update: Strongbow's good. Heroes better.

Another Paper Submitted

I just submitted another paper to a journal. While it's not a "top tier" journal, it's one of the best of the remaining ones. And a couple more publications at this level would be sufficient to lock in tenure at my current school. We figured there were several more things we could add to the paper, but there's a competing paper out there which is similar to ours. So in this case it's better to be quick and done than perfect.

It's always a good day when you send a paper off. At that point, it's off your desk and out of your hands (at least until you get the referee report back in a few months).

We figure that if the reviewer likes the idea and wants changes made or additional work done, he or she will tell us. If not, we just saved some work. And time is of the essence here.

So now I have two pieces under review. I still fall short of Mungo's Rule (i.e. have at least three papers under review at all times), but now I'm within shouting distance. And I have another that I think I can finish within the next two weeks (the week after this is Spring Break at my school, so I can work without distraction).