Entrepreneurial TaxProf Paul Caron has posted his paper with Bernie Black on SSRN rankings.  See also Bainbridge, Kerr, Ribstein, and Leiter. 

Caron and Black use the corporate and tax rankings as a case study to test whether SSRN downloads are a useful measure of scholarly performance.  They conclude that "[t]hese highdownloaded authors are reasonably prominent in these fields, and our judgment is that they would fare well under the other reputation, publication, and citation measures as well." (p. 44)

The tax rankings are on page 45 of the paper, or here.  Bainbridge reprints the corporate rankings here. 

(N.B. My two big scholarly papers are both tax-related, so it is probably right for SSRN to count me as tax, even though I've been working on mostly corporate stuff this summer, and many of the downloads are related to my Deals work, which inflates my tax ranking.)

I agree with Caron and Black that, in general, the highdownloaded authors are reasonably prominent.  But there are exceptions.  Like me. While I do well in the SSRN rankings, I would not fare as well under the more traditional reputation, publication, and citation measures.

The best self-interested spin I can put on this is that, as Caron and Black point out, SSRN downloads are a leading and not a lagging indicator of scholarly performance.  You could say that Orin Kerr and Dan Solove are overrated by SSRN and riding a blogging-related bubble.  Or you could say that they are undervalued by the reputation market and likely to be at the very top of their fields in ten years.  I'd bet on the latter statement before the former. 

Why is that?  Perhaps an analogy will help:  most quantitative rankings (citation counts, many US News measures) are like financial statements for law schools.  Financial statements provide a snapshot of what a company has, not a prediction of what future events will bring.  Scholarly reputation is more like a stock price or market capitalization.  There is only a loose relationship between the quantitative numbers and the qualitative reality.

Now suppose you wanted to make a bet on what the best law faculties in ten years will be.  Leiter's rankings come closest to an accurate stock price.  All else equal, the best faculties now will be the best faculties in ten years, so Leiter's rankings would be a good place to start. 

You would certainly be better off betting based on Leiter than on US News.  Choosing a law school based on US News would be a lot like basing your investment strategy on the spam in your inbox or one of those late night infomercials for options.

SSRN downloads, in this little analogy, are a quantitative ranking, but more like earnings (or maybe earnings growth?) than a balance sheet.  If the goal were to predict the quality of a law faculty ten years out, you might do better betting on SSRN than Leiter or US News. 

I may be stretching here with the analogy.  But I find it useful because it highlights some of the challenges with rankings. Stock prices are not always a reliable indicator of true value. Earnings can be manipulated.  A high number of SSRN downloads may reflect clever naming of papers or gaming the system.  Or it may reflect trendiness, the academic equivalent of a stock market bubble. 

So at the end of the day, SSRN downloads are a useful tool.  Like smart investors, though, we have to view reported earnings -- reported SSRN downloads -- with skepticism.   Don't bet the ranch.

Enough about rankings.  Back to my branding paper.  After all, with Bainbridge chatting up our high SSRN downloads and our Dean hawking law porn, I need to do my part to make sure that UCLA is the next Google, not the next Enron. 

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