A NUMBER OF RECENT studies have attempted to rank departments of finance at universities according to their academic quality.' Such rankings are important for a number of reasons. They provide information for 1) potential students applying for admission to undergraduate and graduate programs in finance, 2) potential faculty applying for employment, 3) potential donors wishing to support quality programs, 4) potential employers wishing to hire graduates of different quality programs, and, perhaps most importantly, 5) the universities themselves in internally evaluating the relative strengths and changes in strengths of their programs. Objective, ordinal academic rankings are difficult to develop because of the multiple objectives of universities, particularly at the larger universities, and the inherently intangible nature of much of their output. Nevertheless, because of the usefulness of the information they convey, construction of rankings is considered important. Because academic quality is difficult to measure directly, most department rankings rely on one or more proxies for quality, such as the publication performance of the faculty, the publication performance of the department's Ph.D. graduates, the starting salaries of graduates of undergraduate and MBA programs, and the prestigiousness of the first teaching position of Ph.D. graduates, or on rankings from peers and other knowledgeable individuals, such as college deans, department chairs, senior faculty, major employers of a particular group of graduates, and even previous graduates. Relatively high correlations