UCSB Ranked Third in Nation for Environmental Economics

In a report released in January 2010, the program in environmental economics at UC Santa Barbara is ranked third among those at all universities in the United States and fifth among those at all the world's universities. The report is a joint production of the University of Connecticut and Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), a collaborative effort involving hundreds of volunteers in 70 countries, who work with a decentralized database to enhance the dissemination of research in economics.

"The strength of environmental economics at UCSB is due in no small way to the farsightedness of the Bren faculty in supporting investment in this area of scholarship," said Bren professor Charles Kolstad, who currently chairs the UCSB Economics Department and has had a joint scholastic appointment with Economics and the Bren School since Bren opened its doors.

The top five universities, in order, are:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2. Harvard University

3. UCSB

4. University of Maryland

5. Columbia University

To determine the order, RePEc computed 31 different rankings accordings to 31 different criteria. They then remove the best and the worst and aggregate the results using a harmonic mean of the rank orders.

Read more about environmental economics at the Bren School and UCSB.