In findings released August 2000, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching awarded Florida International University the highest, most comprehensive rating possible in its prestigious classification system. Since this milestone was reached, FIU has increasingly focused on supporting high-quality graduate programs and academic research. The economics department has fully benefited from, and contributed to, this focus. The department entered a phase of significant transformation in the mid 1990s and has continued to evolve ever since. In fact, fully two-thirds of our research faculty have joined the department during in the last decade. And just as the university has joined the ranks of top public research universities, the department has joined the ranks of high-quality research-oriented programs.
Prospective graduate students are well advised to consider many factors when considering where to study. Most important is whether the department's focus fits with your interests. The department has a diverse group of faculty who are interested in both applied and theoretical issues; they are also interested in diverse fields, including international economics, political economy, economic growth, economic theory, urban economics, public economics, labor economics, and development economics (including Latin American and Caribbean studies as well as regional development problems). The department's programs are further enhanced by the presence of complementary graduate programs in the College of Arts and Sciences, College of Business Administration, and the College of Urban and Public Affairs. And it doesn't hurt that one earns a graduate degree in our department while living Miami.
Ranking the department
Economists like numbers, and we also measure our standing as a department by comparing our research productivity. New rankings based on publications from 1993-2003 are available from econphd.net. On the basis of total publication pages, the department was ranked 85 among US departments. Rankings by departmental publications tends to favor larger and older departments. As a young and small department, the quality of faculty publications might better be reflected in terms of output per author. By this criterion, the department was ranked 60. The department ranked higher yet in the specialty of international economics.
Many rankings of economics departments, based on the journal publication record of their faculty, are unfortunately quite out of date. In fact, all available rankings with the exception of the ones cited above consider only faculty hired before, and research published before, 2000. Because over one-third of our faculty joined the department after 2000, we have produced our own calculations to match those of one prominent study, "Rankings of Academic Journals and Institutions in Economics", by Panetelis Kalaitzidakis, et al.. We followed their their methodology, with the exception that we include only current faculty but all their top-30 publications during the relevant time frame. Kalaitzidakis et al. produced a ranking of departments according to their publication record in top-30 economics journals over the five-year period 1995-1999, where publications were adjusted for journal quality. In Fall 2006, we produced a comparable score for our department for the ten-year period 1997-2006 (including one paper in press that we expect to see in print before the end of the year), and divided the score by two. By these calculations, our department ranks 78 in the United States.