There has been lots of recent activity in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics (AEDE) at The Ohio State University, which serves as the intellectual home (and sometimes the physical home) for many on the Ohio AgManager Team.
Rankings
The National Research Council, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, released its ranking of U.S. Departments of Agricultural and Resource Economics last week. Well, actually, they released two rankings – each based on a different approach to evaluating and assessing graduate programs and faculty research productivity (for an analogy, think AP versus the coaches’ poll in football). AEDE ranked 1st in one ranking and 10th in the other ranking.
| Rank | R-Method | S-Method | |
| 1 | Ohio State | Cal-Berkeley | |
| 2 | Cal-Berkeley | Oregon State | |
| 3 | Clemson | Cal-Davis | Appear in Both |
| 4 | Cal-Davis | Maryland | Cal-Berkeley |
| 5 | Maryland | Cornell | Cal-Davis |
| 6 | Minnesota | Kansas State | Maryland |
| 7 | Wisconsin | Colorado State | Ohio State |
| 8 | Purdue | Wisconsin | Wisconsin |
| 9 | Illinois | Rhode Island | |
| 10 | Virginia Tech | Ohio State |
We are proud of being in the top 10 in both rankings and hope to build on this in the future.
Leadership Change
A key driver of the department’s success has been leadership both at the College and Departmental levels. On October 1st AEDE said farewell to Alan Randall, who retired after 25 years as a faculty member and after serving as Department Chair since 1998. Alan’s scholarship in the areas of Environmental Economics is world renowned and helped pave the way for the AEDE environmental economics group’s international reputation. His leadership during the past 12 years was undoubtedly a critical driver in elevating Ohio State to the rankings mentioned above. We wish Alan well as he transitions to academic opportunities that await him in his native Australia.
Professor Tim Haab, another world-renowned environmental economist, took over leadership of the department as of October 1st. Dr. Haab has written highly influential academic articles and books, but has also made a popular press name for himself as the co-host of the world wide web’s most referenced environmental economics blogs. Items from the blog have been referenced by several major news organizations and offer a fresh and often funny perspective on news items from the perspective of an environmental economist. We look forward to his leadership in the upcoming years.